uc 



Soul to Soul. 



SOUlT TO SOUL: 



LECTURES AND ADDRESSES 



DELIVERED BY 



* 



CHARLOTTE BEEBE WILBOUR 

DURING THE YEARS 
1856— 1858. 



The Soul knows only the Soul, the web of events is the flowing robe in which she 
clothed. — Emerson. 




NEW YORK: 

G. W. CARLETON & CO., PUBLISHERS. 

LONDON : S. LOW, SON & CO. 

MDCCCLXXII. 



7 b 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by 

G. W. CARLETON & CO., 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



Poole & Maclauchlan, Printers, 

205-213 East Twelfth St., 

New York. 



CONTENTS 



PACiH 



Unity in Diversity 1 1 

The Divinity of Truth « 31 

Of God in all Things 55 

The Inward Peace Jj 

The Conqueror and the Saviour. . . 97 

Heaven in its Multiplicity 115 

Spiritual Culture 141 

Faith and Life 169 



UNITY IN DIVERSITY. 
1856. 



UNITY IN DIVERSITY. 



If I were to adopt as the motto of my remarks at this 
time the language that speaks our nation's unity, the 
sounding Latin screamed by our Republican Eagle, 
who is so over-clamorous to tell all the world that our 
many independent sovereign States are but one free 
government, the suspicion of politics, and the endless 
train of association linked with a thousand watchwords 
and noisy demonstrations of party and personal discords, 
would rise in your minds to mar the impression which 
the grand thought might else create. Forget that we 
have an American eagle, that demagogues have ever 
clamored better thoughts than they meant, and that the 
unity which these old syllables enunciate is not precisely 
the model which the harmonist of life and thought would 
adopt, and we have then in the words E pluribus 
unum the pith and marrow of a great idea, the real 
significance of this which I have endeavored, the true 
expression of the highest truth in regard to spiritual 
things as well as in regard to natural things. So far as 
spiritual fact is concerned, an expression, married to 
infinitely holier and dearer associations, has given utter- 
ance to the great truth of Diversal Unity which I stand 



12 Unity in Diversity. 

here to declare : " In my Father's house there are many 
mansions." O, did the teachers of that living gospel 
in whose records this divine thought is expressed, see 
in the words the significance which beams through 
them upon my mind, I cannot doubt a larger charity 
would breathe through their lessons, and the hand of 
human love would not be found to grow so rigid and 
distant in the chill aisles of cathedral and church ! 

Nature's grand lesson of strict unity in infinite diver- 
sity, of the grand One composed of the individual 
Many, is the moral of the solemn-sweet lessons of 
Jesus ; and the words which narrow bigotry must find 
unmeaning and hollow are thus restored to a grandeur 
of benevolent significance by reading them as the spiri- 
tual application of all the teachings of nature, an evan- 
gelizing of the rather degraded motto of our national 
unity. 

The eye of the rude, unlearned beholder is confounded 
with the infinity of things which it beholds, and, though 
he sees but a very minute portion of what even the cul- 
tivated mind discovers, — and all the wisest sees may 
seem but an infinitesimal fraction of the boundless 
whole, — his brain reels under the multitude of impres- 
sions, and the stunned memory lets go its hold on every- 
thing, because it despairs of grasping everything at 
once. So the unphilosophical mind in religious differ- 
ences and moral discords, in multitude of teachings and 
endless shades of thought, sinks into powerless despair 
and denial, or grasps one narrow portion of the infinite 



Unity in Diversity. 13 

creed and clings to it with a deadly desperation ; the 
one is the bigot of belief and religion, the other is the 
no gentler bigot of scepticism and unbelief. Nature and 
God shine and smile above them both, and pityingly 
rain around them their selectest influences. The natural 
philosopher has found a clew in all this tangled warp and 
woof of things. He detects a relation where perhaps 
before him all seemed antagonism and discord. Fire 
and water are henceforth brothers ; the glittering 
diamond is the regal sister of the swarthy charcoal, and 
both are congealed flame. Nature's infinite forms are 
not repetitions of one another, nor confused discords of 
chance and accident. She repeats a few grand princi- 
ples in an endless diversity of figures. Her thought is 
simple in austere grandeur, but her language is affluent 
in unsuspected synonyms and nice distinctions no less 
hidden from the careless. The first effort of brute mat- 
ter toward symmetrical forms we find in the depths of 
the rock, where the molten elements have congealed in 
crystals a thousand-fold variety of figure, flashing a 
myriad-colored light which dazzles and confounds us, 
and we say that even this glory is a grand discord, a 
gorgeous chaos, the wild rhythms and runes of crazy 
nature, mad with the excess of her own surpassing 
wealth, as she goes humming her broken song in the 
dark chambers of her throneless realm. 

But the wise man, with a patient wisdom, and a sys- 
tem of hard names that asks our patience no less, has 
given us what his keen search found, the simple key- 



14 Unity in Diversity. 

note of those wild runes, the three or four plain metres 
of her crystal rhythms, and by these we see that all that 
splendor has a law, all those myriad forms are but the 
blended methods of their simple motions. Here we have, 
in all this dazzling Aladdin's palace of crystalline splen- 
dor, only a few plain angles and curves, with hard names 
of cube and pentagon, and that rhombohedron whose 
diamond eyes look at us from every face of its glittering 
form. These, and the several various names with which 
wisdom re-consigns all beautiful .things to popular ob- 
livion, cover the whole variety of one vast movement of 
the Inorganic toward Life and Soul. A small diction- 
ary will serve us to read vast volumes of wisdom and 
beauty in nature, as in art. 

Again we have in the one great law of undulation, vi- 
bration, or waves, the key to the wonderful movements 
and results of all those semi-vital elements and agents 
that give to matter such an air of soul, and lend the soul 
such a wide insight to, and communion with, the laws of 
matter. Light, heat, and sound roll in bright, glowing, 
musical waves of ether, in which only the philosopher 
sees the unitary element in the common law of their 
propagation. So, too, the pulses of the rapid lightning 
flutter from continent to continent, in measurelessly 
minute vibrations, which yet, like the vibrations of the 
human tongue, are now made articulate language. So 
too, in a host besides, of subtle agents, from that child of 
married zinc and copper, named, from their ritual priest, 
Galvanism, down to the last oddity of strange science, 



Unity in Diversity. 15 

Od-force, through I know not what isms and ologies, we 
trace by their swift undulations the one deep bond of 
affinity, the central pulses of their common brotherhood. 
They are, one and all, Wave-powers, and the stunned 
ears that deafen under their many names, prick up with 
a hopeful elation when they hear that after all these 
forces are strung on one thread, and we are no longer in 
peril of being hit by their random and erratic operations ; 
though their mysterious cabalistic names still make the 
timid shudder at their monstrous multitude, with strong 
foreboding of something wrong yet, something inexpli- 
cable and ugly in their secret conclaves, we are still 
assured that those dreadful names are quite innocent, 
and dear old Nature is wholly innocent of them, and 
works through one law these various manifestations ; 
in short, that these are the thousand-fold inflections of 
her one most active verb To Do. 

The scale of nature is the measure of the soul, as the 
"cubit of the angel" was the "measure of a man." 
All things have their standard of value in the smaller. 
We do not measure feet by yards, cents by dollars, nor 
the kingdom of heaven by an infinite rule. We must 
have something within our grasp, some familiar and 
appreciable thing to lay to the wealth of the vast and 
unknown as their measure ; something which we may 
lift in detail to cast in the balance against the ponderous 
spheres whose greatness, if we do not thereby compre- 
hend it, will at least impress us with the littleness of our 
comprehension. The crystals of the cave and rock 



1 6 Unity in Diversity. 

shall serve us still as types. All things crystallize in 
cooling. When once the vast fire ether began to har- 
den round its burning core, a glorious tracery of delight- 
ful forms grew in the obedient mass and stiffened in 
everlasting beauty; or perhaps, ill-formed and half-obe- 
dient, they hardened into ugliness which must await 
another fire to melt them again to freedom, that they 
may renew the effort to congeal into beauty. In sparry 
glory that looks not on sun and moon till the earth- 
quake ploughs his furrows, there in the primeval rock 
the gems and jewels of the earth feed their fire-hearts 
in the darkness, or till man, the master, comes and 
lays his small right hand upon the rocks and mountains 
and says, " Be ye removed, and cast into the vales to 
pave my path among the nations." Then what was 
born in the darkness comes forth to glitter in the light, 
as a child of the light. Then its concentrated fire 
blazes unburning on the breast of Beauty, or exalts the 
glory of regal power on the crown and sceptre of Rule. 
But the very rock itself is a rude crystal, and if it seems 
dull and dark in the mass, it is still capable, by te-fusion, 
of all the beautiful forms that it ever veiled, and may 
even go up with all inorganism to the glorious undula- 
tion of animate forms, and grow warm with the living 
soul of man ! 

Prophets and Evangelists are the strong commis- 
sioned souls whose pentecostal fire-tongues hold the 
world in fusion. It is hardly a figure of speech to say 
that their words burn ; for the quickened blood that 



Unity in Diversity. 17 

leaps under their eloquence, or is compressed in awe 
back upon the heart by the grandeur of their magni- 
ficent thought, bears the very sensation of fire, contains 
the very fact of more rapid combustion. No moral 
utterance can come nearer to being literal and absolute. 
But Prophets and Evangelists are rare ; nature is not 
prodigal of the race, and an age or twain elapses after 
the advent of one before we may read the sign-manual 
of God in the commission of another. The world once 
all ablaze again in a fine rare ether, like its primeval 
soul, again cools and crystallizes into forms and systems 
round the fixed stars of each burning thought, and these 
thenceforth stand out in solid permanence, diamond 
or granite, quartz or felspar, according to their several 
circumstances. Thus round the retreating fervor of 
some old fire-souled paganized thought, hardened to 
the dull opaque rock of offence that which we call Pa- 
ganism ; thus round the centres of flaming truth, as 
the world settled back again from the fiery advent of 
the Nazarene, gathered the translucent Rock of Ages, 
the concrete soul of Jesus working in half-obedient 
humanity. The figure still holds, for not until the 
waning of the influence of the living prophet did his 
teachings take the fixed form of creed and system, or 
his followers become a sect in the strict sense of the 
word. 

Every new teacher reasserts the universality of the 
Law of God, the grand unity of the whole brotherhood 
of man. While the warm glow is on them, his disciples 



1 8 Unity in Diversity. 

feel the fluid unity, as pulses of one boundless ether, 
throbbing through them ; when the first broad glow 
dies down to a less lambent fire, they narrow intG 
creeds, they grow frigid in forms, not vital, happily for 
us, if beautiful, and the true expression of their forma- 
tive law. When the re-former comes he has first to melt 
these stubborn elements and set them afloat again in 
God's free air, the more perfectly afloat the better, 
that in resuming shape again they may obey the inform- 
ing power and grow to beautiful pillars in the temple of 
truth, or star-like jewels in his church's crown. Were 
it not for the danger of degrading the figure to the qua- 
drupedal attitude, I would further suggest that as the 
crystal forms need no hand to shape them, but only free- 
dom of their elements to combine according to their 
laws, so man wants only the free play of his natural 
powers and capacities to be shaped in spiritual harmony 
and beauty. Whatever compulsion of vehement preach- 
ing he needs to melt him out of the distorted and 
broken and impure forms which have bound him, he 
needs but the liberal and God-creative grace to mould 
him into beauty. Something of the other thing, of com- 
pelling his spirit to this form or that, has made the 
thousand forms in which he has grown imperfect, dull 
and dark. Buddhism and Judaism, Islamism and Chris- 
tianism, and the endless other names of Catholic, Me- 
thodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and what you will, into 
which this our faith is subdivided, are all more or less 
narrowed by the will of the systematizer. But in none 



Unity in Diversity, 19 

of them, not in the rudest, darkest, and most obscure, 
has the vital fact been wholly obliterated. The univer- 
sal law asserts itself here, and in all their diversity runs 
a thread of unity. The discord of their names will con- 
found the unwise and mislead the illiterate. But the 
philosopher of moral truth, with a large heart to sym- 
pathize with all that in human hearts would struggle 
earnestly towards the truth, whatever small snatch of it 
they may have attained, sees in the chaos of symmetric 
method the working of a universal law. 

How beautiful it is to be able to feel and know that 
these names are nothing radical, nothing substantial ; 
that under all the master-hand works well, and rudest 
elements, moved by one plastic impulse, grow to what 
shapes they may, now to the diamond that glitters on 
the jewelled finger, now to the secret spar that hugs its 
own dark-veiled flame in the cavernous depths of the 
earth ! How beautiful the thought that God cannot for- 
sake his world, and no soul that his law has made can 
escape the blessed influence of his all-creative spirit ! 
While the disciples of each true or half-true thought, 
true in the enjoyment of a single ray, clear or dim, take 
one phase of infinite truth, and think one the whole, he 
who discovers an underlying common truth of two such 
mysteries, a thread of secret unity combining both, has 
doubled his spiritual wealth, made himself richer by the 
appropriation of a whole new realm coequal with his 
own. He cannot be called less a believer even in his 
old faith, for he has enlarged his creed and left out only 



20 Unity in Diversity. 

what should never have entered into any declaration of 
faith, the denial of other faiths. All that a man knows 
is positive, and the existence of what is beyond he has 
no more charter to deny than a blind man has to assert 
the fallacy of vision and denounce faith in the solar 
spectrum. He who can discover in all creeds an essen- 
tial unity, making harmony of their discord and justify- 
ing the ways of Providence, once more has multiplied 
his wealth by all their riches, and made himself partaker 
of whatever blessing it contains, while each new thought 
is his own sole privilege. He has done more : he has 
made the world his debtor, and woven a strong clew 
through the failing bond of human brotherhood. Out 
of the poverty of long bankrupt creeds he wins pearl 
— the heir-loom of the ages — for ages buried under the 
wastes of a decaying system. He rakes from the tem- 
ples a treasure long forgotten, and in the archives of the 
church discovers a meaning and a symmetrical history 
unknown before ; for even the builders build more truly 
than they know when they work in solemn earnest. He 
restores the true sense to hollow words, the life of soul 
to outgrown faiths. He is a better pagan than the 
pagans, a truer Catholic than the Catholics, and inter- 
prets Calvin with a clearer sense than the Calvinists. 
If the Christian will not own him, Christ will not deny 
him ; for the large charity that accepts all men in bro- 
therly unity cannot fail to win the fellowship of those 
who have been the martyrs of love. He can afford to 
be misunderstood, for while living in the integrity and 



Unity in Diversity. 21 

wholeness of his large faith, he needs not the whole 
sympathy of partial men, since he has a claim on some- 
thing of the broad sympathies of all. 

Into the historical justification of my expanded faith 
in the diversal unity of creeds, I feel myself incompe- 
tent to enter now more than by mere allusion and sug- 
gestion. But I am happy to know that the task has 
been done, and I believe nobly done, by a woman, one 
of the ornaments of our sex, whose beautiful soul has 
hitherto flowed in the harmonies of beautiful expres- 
sion. I doubt not this last utterance, the ripened effort 
of many years, will prove as worthy of her genius as it 
has been grateful to struggling souls in the sad discords 
of contending faiths. Other duties have deprived me 
of the pleasure of reading this labor of Lydia Maria 
Child, and I know not how far short I may fall of her 
Catholicity ; or if I may not haply seem too liberal even 
for her. 

In spite of all that has been said, and all that serves 
to justify the assertion to the contrary, a true polythe- 
ism has never existed. In all systems there is one 
Supreme God ; and the gods, as they were called, were 
but superior angels, or subordinate divinities. A stran- 
ger to the interpretations of our creeds who should 
designate the doctrine of the Trinity and the faith in 
angelic essences as polytheism, would commit no grosser 
blunder than they do who deny the supremacy of Jupi- 
ter in the Roman Pantheon, or divide the power of 
Zeus in the Greek. The great central faith of the 



22 Unity in Diversity. 

Hindu was the unity of God and the tri-unity of his 
development. The incarnate divinity was taught in 
Egypt before the pyramids of Memphis, before the 
hand of Moses shook the plagues of God over the land 
of Pharaoh. The Christmas Yule-logs burned in Scan- 
dinavia and all the frozen North, ages before the gospel 
of Christ was uttered in our world. Janus the twofold, 
the human and divine, saw his fair temples decked with 
evergreens, and the twelve days of Christmas celebrated 
with joy, gifts of friendship, and acclamations of delight 
for the new-born god, the son of righteousness come 
back to reign again and subdue all things to his genial 
empire, long before the name of the carpenter's son had 
been heard in Judea. 

There is no creed in all antiquity of which we know 
the history, that has not in it those great central ele- 
ments of faith : One God ; his incarnate effluence com- 
ing to save and bless, and dying or suffering loss and 
exile for humanity ; his return in power to take ven- 
geance on his enemies or to fulfil his broken mission ; 
his reascension, or promise of reascension, into the 
heavens, to reign in glory over his redeemed ; the in- 
evitable reward of evil deeds and deeds of good, accord- 
ing to their merit, and the consequent immortality of 
the soul. That there have been deniers of these things 
in aH ages, it were more than idle for us to deny. But 
they are exceptional, and mar not the completeness of 
the assertion that these truths are the universal creed of 
man. There never was an age in which they were not 



Unity in Diversity. 23 

asserted, or if there was, there has come no record of it 
to us. One might then as well think to shake the moun- 
tain from its rooted base by scepticism and denial as to 
eradicate the central truths of religion from the human 
soul. That there may be the visionaries of a theory who 
will assert the non-existence of the granite hills, we can- 
not deny, for such have been ; but a few ounces of 
granite seeking the centre, if obstructed by their unbe- 
lieving heads, would carry more weight of conviction 
than all the Catskills on their unmoving bases, Kearsarge 
and all his gray brotherhood. Your Cro'nest and the 
Palisades, great Chimborazo and his burning peaks, 
may seem in the distance mere theories and phantasies, 
the projected images of ideas not luminous, but volumi- 
nous. But a little pebble projected against the doubter's 
tingling senses will beget far other ideas a deal more 
substantial and genuine. Wise men never followed the 
theories of such dreamers, however wise these dreamers 
may have been themselves. Nor will a wise man for 
one moment doubt the living truths of the one great 
faith, for any denial he may encounter ; nay, though for 
its assertion he himself be classed with the deniers as 
infidel. 

This unity, thus developed, -has its practical moral in 
the great lesson of charity and human brotherhood 
which it teaches. We are all spiritually akin to each 
other as we are physically. The taunt which is flung at 
us as an insult falls powerless in its simple truth, a 
truth as acceptable and comforting as it is great, " that 



24 Unity in Diversity. 

we fraternize with this or the other odious sect." Yes, 
we tell our accuser, and with none more odious to us 
than yours ; for all are acceptable, so far as they are 
genuine faiths. If we have confidence in the doctrines 
we affirm, what disturbance can it be to our souls to 
learn that Simon Magus and the Witch of Endor 
wrought and thought as we. So much the better, we 
say, for Simon Magus and the Witch of Endor, and that 
ends the quarrel in that direction. And then what if 
men prove that Confucius, and Swedenborg, and Andrew 
Jackson Davis have taught, in several marked particu- 
lars, precisely what we teach ; we are prepared from our 
very position to believe that fact, and congratulate at 
once the Chinaman, the Swede, and the Poughkeep- 
sian for the first possession of so much of that common 
light which lighteth every man who cometh into the 
world. I am more willing to admit the application of 
distant creeds, than to admit that God should leave the 
vast majority of his world beyond the light of his 
spiritual sun, beyond the warmth of his luxuriant, be- 
nignant smile. I know that in our Father's house 
there are many mansions, but that it is not the less the 
house of Our Father, the heavenly temple of the living 
truth ; for home and temple are all one in the divine 
order of things. These mansions are spiritual condi- 
tions, degrees of developments, functions, and offices 
adapted to differing souls ; for I suppose there is no 
literalist so literal as to think a structure of substantial 
walls, divided into various wards and chambers for the 



Unity in Diversity. 25 

various indwellers, is intended by the language. And 
even if one did so accept it, it alters nothing ; for these 
different mansions must be adaptations of the heavenly 
state to different degrees of spirit-growth and culture. 
The central unity of purpose with a countless diversity 
of means and forms will as truly exist in the literal as in 
the figurative signification of the words ; and that is 
heaven and truth and harmony. Not identity of sound 
is the secret of harmony, not sameness of color pro- 
duces pure light, nor is universal truth the attainment 
of any, though most perfect finite mind. All we ask of 
the musician is that his several notes be struck to the 
same key ; all we can demand of nature is that her lumi- 
nous rays blend in just proportions to give us pure 
light, and all that we may expect to win from God in 
the providential history of the soul is that our earnest 
teachers in all climes and ages shall, by faithfulness to 
their own peculiar, hue of thought, be harmonized in the 
universal rays of truth, — fit elements to combine in the 
pure light, or fit mediums to bear that light purely to 
the groping world. 

Every form of the unitary faith had not only its ne- 
cessity in a law of our nature which were enough to 
justify its existence, but also its mission high enough to 
justify its being were there no necessity. From the 
worship of the sun and moon and stars as symbols of 
the invisible life which rules them, grew astronomy and 
the sciences. The requisite machinery of the temples 
developed and kept alive the mechanic arts. The abso- 



26 Unity in Diversity. 

lute tyranny of the Romish Church was an iron bit in 
the jaws of a degraded world, and its lavish wealth has 
created architecture and arts which shall long survive 
the poor degraded forms of Romanism, to expand our 
souls and cultivate our tastes. Protestantism, which no 
believer in religion can look upon as a distinct perma- 
nency, has its mission to enfranchise the soul and set 
thought and conscience free from priest and purgatory. 
It is the genius of religion to be affirmative, positive 
and a radical, eternal truth. Protestantism does declare 
faith in the vitality of that truth which yet makes the 
perpetuity of the sects impossible ; for individual free- 
dom comports no more with synods than councils, can 
live no better in Saybrook than in Trent. Even the 
wild frenzy of unbelief and denial, an inverted religion, 
has its moral use, and is in sooth but the ultimation of 
that Lutheran era, a prolonged wave of that storm 
which swept over the Vatican and washed some blots 
from the papal purple. Belief has a stronger grasp on 
the soul than has come to it through doubt. A rigid 
inquisition dooms the weak and, unstable in creeds to 
the cleansing fire, and leaves a purer faith, as gold 
thrice molten, to reward the painful struggle and ordeal. 
Let us then be glad of all that is earnest in human 
creeds, and for no amount of mingled error reject one 
clear truth or refuse to give full credit to the first who 
brings it to us. We all work together in the out-work- 
ing of God's law, under his mastering hand, even when 
seeming most self-promoters of our narrow purposes. 



Unity in Diversity. 27 

Our ways are not one, but the common centre spheres 
them all ; our works are many, but the common purpose 
sanctifies them all if to that one great purpose they are 
bent. There is one beauty of the rose and one of the 
lily, and if among a thousand roses there shall be a 
thousand shades, of a broad meadow of lilies no second 
flower shall reproduce all the first. The leaves of the 
forest are millions and their families are thousands, but 
a few simple elemental laws round every curve and 
shape every spire, touch their varied tissues with a 
thousand shades and give to each its own low melody 
in the great psalm of the wind-waving woods. 

All this is as significant as it is familiar. It teaches 
us that we need not mar the integrity of our individual 
natures by being members of great natural families. 
Thought and feeling have their classes distinct as oak 
and pine in the family of trees. True to ourselves we 
are then true to our select circles ; to the larger bro- 
therhood of the social relations ; the chosen of our 
natures, not our wills ; the true church of the faithful 
according to the newest revelation. To war on sects as 
such is to protest against nature and merge pines in 
oaks, and all diversity in dead uniformity ; it is, in fact, 
to be the most absolutely sectarian that it is possible for 
the human mind to be. It is the distinguishing illiter- 
ality of narrow sects that they will fellowship no other 
and desire that no other might exist. 

But the true soul is thankful for all that seek truth in 
whatever paths they walk. He will not be silent in the 



28 Unity in Diversity. 

starry choir of God's worshippers because another harp 
strikes another note than his. Far down in the gradu- 
ated march of life he sees rank below rank the long 
procession winding up, up from the ultimate atoms of 
the solid world, a growing chain of being with linked 
bands aspiring to the highest. Shall he let go his hold 
because the rude, uncultivated, sinful, weak are there ? 

No : the electric chain were broken then and some 
must suffer who before took healing from his pulses. 
No : for he looks aloft, and thither the living chain 
winds upward, still up through all the starry distance 
till the last link is lost in the effulgence of the throne of 
truth. Grateful that he can be an element in the eter- 
nal harmony, a link in the diversal unity of the world, 
he bows his head to the Father of Life and says in 
meekness : 

" Father, let me do thy will." 



THE DIVINITY OF TRUTH. 



April, 1856. 



THE DIVINITY OF TRUTH 



If for six thousand years, as they tell us, since with 
its living freight of throbbing clay, and aspiring soul, 
this world of ours was launched into the abyss of space, 
the deep heart within us, organic hope and fear, joy 
and sorrow, and the yet deeper soul, intangible essence, 
touching God with its right hand and hugging earth 
with its left, have wrestled with the darkness, and strug- 
gled into light, how shall we now need preachers and 
teachers to exalt the name of Truth ? Why should we 
now be standing on the threshold of another era of the 
unwinding mysteries of life, and still be seekers of new 
light, and catechumen in the broad temple of the Divinity 
of Truth ? Ah, because it is divine, an unbounded, ever- 
lasting mystery, opening to the seeker only tittle by tit- 
tle ; and because the darkness is clinging and dense,/and 
of the material blood and kin of our lower nature, which 
must be conquered and subordinated to the higher be- 
fore our souls are permeable by the pure light of heaven. 

Prophets and Poets had proclaimed the highest reve^"~ 
lations of the advancing soul, and for four thousand 
years, along the river of time, had launched their glow- 
ing thoughts like gliding fire-ships starring the darkness 



32 The Divinity of Truth. 

with their flames, and yet the world stood, deep as its 
heart, in black night and in crime, waiting, yearning, 
groaning for more light. Its very crime and the wail 
of its immortal agony were eloquent appeals from rest- 
less error to the heavens of truth, and true hearts, with 
a painful gladness, caught the clear glimpses of its light, 
and died in pangs of insatiable aspiration, struggling to 
take in a fuller measure of its beatific effluence and its 
perilous beauty. Perilous, I say, not less for this age 
than for that ; for never, since the*wrestle with night and 
sin began, has the divine truth, newly announced but 
everlasting in its essence, been out of the shadow of the 
cross and gibbet, save when it stood in the broad glare 
of the fagot, and the more fearful glare of angry eyes 
walling its solitary champion round as with the flashing 
points of myriad daggers. 

Two thousand years ago the world had hope again, 
— the world that crucifies its gods, and deifies its own 
immolated victims. Again in the awful judgment-hall 
of Pilate, where timid Truth could find no sympathizing 
softness in the stern faces that frowned around the cul- 
prit's bar, the question was re-uttered, What is Truth ? 
unanswered hitherto through all the ages, in the wild 
outbursts of poetic frenzy, from prophet, and bard, and 
sibyl. 

The unconscious heart of humanity must have felt 
an inexplicable yearning, as it waited for the answer 
from those lips that spake as never man spake, but they 
answered "not a word;" and yet the perplexed ques- 



The Divinity of Truth. 33 

tioner went forth to plead for the speechless and be- 
trayed ! Two thousand years that prophet's name has 
blazoned on the banners of the world, and his symbol 
cross, the cruel cross of his ignominious death, has 
glittered in gold on the spires of princely temples, and 
flashed from the purple robes of priests arrayed in 
kingly power and splendor ; but the deep aching heart 
of humanity still yearns for that answer, and the lips of 
the great silence have never parted. An army of eager 
disciples throng round each one of many thousand teach- 
ers, all crying, " Lo, here ! Lo, there ! I have truth. 
Here it rests and can be found nowhere else/' till the 
confused heart and soul, thrice confounded in the swel- 
tering chaos of opinions, could say of any teacher, first 
Nazarene, or last New Englander, Let him be thrice 
deified, so he but burst the locks of this silence and tell 
us verily, what is truth. No man believes the question 
was ever clearly solved, who assists in this age to main- 
tain the innumerable preachers and seekers of truth, and 
no man, with a ray of fellow-feeling for his struggling 
race, will be found out of this helpful brotherhood. But 
though the lips of the great teacher were mute, when 
he might have crowned his mission with a triumphant, 
everlasting announcement of the law, had he seen it as 
we believe he did, and been pleased to utter it with 
compelling clearness, as we deem he might have done, 
yet it seems that with a deeper knowledge than appears 
to us, he chose not to reiterate the eloquence of his 
whole life in words, which could add no emphasis to 
s 



34 The Divinity of Truth. 

that living gospel. If Pilate, and the thousands of 
yearning hearts that looked longingly to Jesus for the 
answer, which no words could utter more clearly, could 
not, or would not read the divine reply in all that won- 
derful life of lowly greatness and unpretending pride, 
soft womanly strength and all-pervading fidelity, neither 
could they receive it in the most studied pages of the 
scholar, if not in the grand simplicity of the untaught 
carpenter. 

The man of words will tell us that Truth is truth, the 
thing which one verily trows or thinks ; that man's 
truth is practically what he comes to, in his mind, after 
actual earnest search, and trial of the evidence ; his troth 
and not a hear-say; his actual thought and not an echo ; 
that God's truth is the thought of God, the absolute 
fact of things, as they are and should be ; that toward 
this absolute truth man should turn to seek the test of 
his faith ; and as far as his thought shall be found to 
harmonize with that which is uttered in the great Bible 
of creation, it will be truth absolute, a living contribution 
to the lesser bibles of recorded truth. So have I read 
from wise men, men of dictionaries and much lingual 
knowledge, but not seeking the essence of living things 
in the husks of dry words. I look through nature and 
the history of man, through the records of the prophets 
and apostles, and the suggestions of the aspirations 
written, and at last come to a notion of what we seek, 
which need not ground a quarrel with the man of dic- 
tionaries, and shall not be open to challenge from the 



The Divinity of Truth. 35 

man of Bibles. Truth is conformity to the law of 
things, to that method by which they are, and act, the 
inward pulses of their nature, the structural motions of 
their primeval essence. The pine tree in growing- not 
from an acorn but a pine-cone, in putting forth lances 
of green lightning-rods to call down the lightning of 
life into its boughs, stirring its sap with newness of 
vigor, instead of spreading broad hands like praying 
saints to take the blessing from the life giving airs : it 
is true in clinging to its foliage all the long year, and 
baffling winter with its everlasting green. The oak 
tree is true in precisely the opposite course, putting off 
its greenness to take the wrath of winter on its naked 
boughs, as the storm-lashed sailor strips his straining 
masts to weather the gale in safe and more humble 
attire. The stone in falling, the smoke in rising, the 
wave in advancing and receding, the hissing fire-bolt 
of the summer cloud in crinkling up and down in zig-zag 
paths, the sphered orbs of heaven in everlasting wheel- 
ing, all are true, for they fulfil their law ; their methods 
accord with their completed natures, and only for- 
eign elements, the impediment of unrelated circum- 
stance, or substance, will divert these from their way, 
and make them untrue, make them false and therefore 
self-destructive and endangering the integrity of the 
world, and the universe. It is thus with the crowning 
work of creation, as with all below. Obedience to 
the law by which he is organized and ruled, the law 
of his nature, as it stood in the pure intent of the 



36 The Divinity of Truth. 

maker or fashioner of his being, is truth. The free 
play of every simple, unadulterated faculty, the unob- 
structed flow of all his vital forces into their legitimate 
channels, and these alone, is the true life, or the ex- 
pressed truth of his nature. 

Because God is the master of life, the source of law, 
the infinite mover of all, in vital forces and impelled 
elements, we are led to reverence truth for its divinity, 
to seek it for its necessity, to cherish it for its protecting 
strength, and trust its immortal, newness for its inex- 
haustible infinity. With a less source for the law of 
things, their slight motions would be less divine ; if less 
related to our souls by that high paternity, it were less 
necessary to know and obey the truth, as it is in other 
lives than ours. Were its fatherly Cause less an 
almightiness, its strong presence in us were less a mas- 
tering power and conquering element, and were He not 
limitless, from whom the truth emanates, its shallow 
waters would fail to our infinite thirst. Thus in every 
point of view to which we subject it, the necessary 
relation of truth to the God of truth exalts it to that 
holier height, in which I have chosen to present it ; and 
makes the reverence which has drawn me to the theme, 
a natural tribute to the Divinity of Truth. 

The Divinity of Truth is no new lesson, neither in 
the mute unconscious attribution of men, nor the ex- 
press utterance of our olden teachers, the prophets and 
the poets, evangelists and martyrs. 



The Divinity of Truth. 37 

It is acknowledged as Divine by the spontaneous 
reverence of men for the discoverer of new truths, and 
the faithful announcers and enforcers of the old, long 
known, but never supremely throned, truths. A shout 
of gratulation goes up to heaven when any daring 
explorer in untrodden paths brings back intelligence of 
unknown realms. The heroic traveler will penetrate 
the burning desert, and front with a dauntless heart the 
savage wild beasts, and the more savage men, the in- 
visible pest that smites at noon-day and withholds not 
its hand from slaughter in the depths of midnight ; he 
will endure hunger and thirst, make his bed with the 
scorpion and asp, to bring us, if he may, some longer 
stretch of geographic lines, a few more pages of blood- 
stained history, or haply a new version of the protean 
fable, under which immutable truth veils the transcend- 
ent beauty of her face. 

Who does not remember the throbbing at the heart 
and jubilant cheer, at the bare announcement of the 
safety, nothing more, of our brave countryman, who 
tracked grim winter to his hyperborean lair, and grap- 
pled the great frost-dragon in his den. What if he 
brought back but a little dearly bought and life sancti- 
fied lore, wrung from the frozen grip of the North, 
with peril and labor worthy to conquer kingdoms ? It 
was all the more precious for that scantiness, and men 
will not soon forget the services of the man who per- 
iled his life in the grizzly horrors of a Polar night to 
enlarge the field of human knowledge and bring back 



38 The Divinity of Truth. 

a little light from the icy throne of eternal winter. And 
though more interests are invaded by the bold explorer 
of the moral world, the undaunted adventurer, who 
fronts the burning tropics of selfish wrath, and the 
withering frost airs of unmelting ocean, to bring out 
new truths from the soul's hidden mysteries, new lessons 
for the infinite needs of the heart, and though for this 
cause less glory and delight are the immediate fruits 
of his labors, and hate and martyrdom itself await him, 
yet when these interests have yielded, and their nursed 
hates have been quenched by time, there is no office 
more sacred than his, who stands as the interpreter of 
these life-bought truths. The priests of every nation 
are the favorites of a grateful people, till their corrup- 
tions make them a terror, and at last compel men to 
depose them and anoint new priests, from the fire- 
crowned heresiarchs they thought to slay. God's pro- 
phets and evangelists are never defrauded of their 
glory, for men are but too apt to overpay what lagging 
justice has too long withheld. The fearless announcers 
of new truth may walk to their thrones through the fire 
of martyrdom, but for long ages after, they shall reign 
in undisputed sovereignty. 

The bibles of all nations are the preached gospels of 
their arch heretics, the burning, glowing words of truth, 
as it stood before the daring eyes that pierced the veil 
of sanctified errors to fathom the true heavens beyond. 
But their very martyrdom was the enemies' obliged 
confession of the divinity of truth. The instincts of 



The Divinity of Truth. 39 

bad men are not less seen in detecting truth than the 
kindlier instincts of the good. By a complete inversion 
of the healthy appetite for truth, they repel it with 
wrathing and hate, and become to the wise, significant 
witnesses of the divine nature of the hated thing, as 
are the loving admiration and reverence of good and 
holy souls. The rebuke which angers the wicked, is 
health-giving to the lover of light. Men cannot escape 
the summons of heaven to testify of its ministers, for 
if they are dumb, they speak the awe they blush to 
own ; and if they rave, they confess the excellence they 
cannot rival, and which is to them a perpetual rebuke. 

I have claimed the Divinity of Truth from its origin. 
It is no less a Necessity of all Things. As the God of 
the universe is the God of truth, the universe itself is a 
visible expression of absolute truth, of that perfect har- 
mony of motion and being, that perfect obedience to 
inherent laws, without which there could be neither 
universe nor God. The solitary stars which move in 
illimitable space, far beyond the reach of the eagle's 
flight, though he should be endowed with tenfold speed 
and a power to sustain life and motion in the hollow 
spaces of the heavens, and though he shot right on for 
a thousand years, and thousands of thousands yet be- 
yond : these lone bright hermits in the infinite desert 
of heaven, are yet linked brothers in indissoluble social 
laws ; they wheel together, banded by eternal chains of 
fellowship, and that broad hand of God which men call 



4-0 The Divinity of Truth. 

Gravitation, clasps them together in its hollow palm. 
Were they not true in the fine equipoise of their pon- 
derous orbs, obedient to the one infinite law, and all the 
individual laws of their sphere and of the universe, the 
human imagination has not vividness enough to shape 
the conception of the fatal consequences, the mad, wild 
rush of flaming suns through space, the crash of giant 
orbs hurled on each other, dashing out in far- affrighted 
chasms of airless space their crumbling asteroids, " like 
sparks from the roaring anvil of the God of fire." The 
bellowing of their all-deafening thunders, and the thou- 
sand-fold braided lightnings of their meteor trains, 
would make worse ruin than primeval chaos, and sink 
at last into black, eternal blankness, yet more horrible 
than that ruin ! The stability of the physical universe 
depends not more on the truth of physical harmony of 
its parts, than the integrity of the moral universe de- 
pends upon moral truth, the harmony of its parts with 
the whole, and of the whole with the universal cause. 
Out of the acknowledged divinity of truth, comes then, 
as a natural consequence, the lesson of its necessity. 
As the law of gravitation is universal, swinging the 
great suns in their unjarring orbits and driving the tiny 
pebble to the rippling waters of the pool, so this necessi- 
ty of truth, of harmony obedient to the law of things, 
extends from the throned constellations, Orion and the 
Pleiades, the beautiful Crown and the eternal Lode-star, 
to the little works of private men, their little thoughts, 
and loves and hates. Who builds not truly, builds not 



The Divinity of Truth. 41 

enduringly ; who despises the requirements of the law, 
shall perish. The architect who condemns the require- 
ments of the law, the demands of truth, harmony, and 
the graces of symmetry, may pile elaborate fragments 
to the heavens, and sink a monarch's wealth in the 
stupendous folly ; but a temple or a palace he will 
never see grow up beneath his lawless hand ; an ela- 
borate blunder, a carved and graven, gilded and 
veneered outrage and monstrosity will grow there, 
shameful and a monument of shame. Or if he scorn 
that other law of uprightness, and say in his heart, " I 
will not pay allegiance to the blind, black centre of this 
dirty globe ; I will build whither I will, and shame the 
cravens who pay deference to gravity." Slowly up, 
month after month, his heavy blocks of marble and 
granite will climb ; slowly out, jutting from their centre 
more and more, till anon he will look up upon his mad 
work, and cry " Victory," exulting over the defeated 
power of gravity. Ha ! in an instant more, a wild 
crash warns him that the Gods are over him, and the 
fixed centre below. Down comes his tumbling ruin 
on his own infatuated head ; and the palace wall of 
him who scorned the central law, is hurled in a wild 
heap above his shapeless clay. 

The fool who built his house upon the sand, neglect- 
ing the law of fundamental integrity, could claim no 
exemption from the inevitable ruin, for any beauty of 
the inward finish, for any symmetry of the outward 

form. 

6 



42 The Divinity of Truth. 

When the floods came and the winds blew, and beat 
upon that house, it fell, and great was the fall thereof. 
Ah, again and again, the everlasting judgment of nature 
has gone out against all liars ! 

Whatever your hand touches to do, or undo, what- 
ever your brain silently fancies, or your creative genius 
bears forth to expression, whether you plan a poem 
or a battle, shape the scheme of a statue, a picture, a 
bargain, or a state, be true or fail, obey the law or 
reap ruin and confusion. God and nature will bless 
no hollow pretense, will adopt and sanctify no sham. 
Plant truly, or be beggared in harvest. Expect not 
figs from thorns, nor grapes from thistles. Sow not 
tares for wheat, or be prepared to feed on emptiness. 

The hollow mockery of a life of lies, of a life not 
founded on the eternal rock of integrity, should startle 
the weak, the degraded, the cowardly and the wicked 
from the poor subterfuge of lies, to take hold in earnest 
on some solid fact, and cling there till the heart grows 
strong, and the soul assured to stand on what it is, and 
be the exponent of some truth more its own than any 
other's. If the architects of a marble temple must, on 
pain of shame and ruin, build to the plumb and line, 
how much more solemn is the obligation laid on the 
architects of character, whose life-long labors, growing 
up in the silence and darkness of inward experience, 
will yet stand revealed before the eyes of angels and 
men, as even in their silent undergrowth they stand 
before the eyes of God. Slowly through the long 



The Divinity of Truth. 43 

years, he works, unconsciously and by volition, who 
builds his temple of life and scorns the law, hiding a 
secret lie, and forgetting that all things are crystal to 
the eyes of heaven and heavenly souls. He works in 
heart-ache and soul-weariness, with no faith outwardly 
because of no truth inwardly, and cements the crooked 
fabric of his life with the black blood of his own misery, 
his tortured heart grinding, with slow agony of can- 
kering care, despair, and smothered shame, and terror 
half-concealed, his very bones, to mold the untempered 
mortar of his hollow walls, moistened with tears of 
secret shame and open resentment ; for anger weeps 
in the weakness of conscious guilt. The shadow of 
impending ruin rests forever on his soul, and long 
before an enemy even, has detected the false heart of 
the structure, he feels the outward yawn, the heavy 
leaning of his work to ruin. He feels the tremor of 
the unsteady walls, and every footfall in the march of 
events, seems the tramp of his commissioned doom. 
While yet the hollow fabric shows the fairest in the 
unanointed eyes of men, the inevitable crash comes ; 
down comes the gilded palace of his life mockery, his 
shallow, hollow, false pretending character, and there 
before the eyes of men, startled, astonished, censuring 
or pitying men, his houseless soul stands naked as it 
stood before the eyes of God and angels, stands 
shivering visibly in the storm of scorn, as it coiled 
shivering and unseen before, when with a smile he 
sheathed the agony of the inward pang, like a rank- 



44 The Divinity of Truth. 

ling steel in his heart which only rankles deeper day 
by day. 

Truth never costs the martyr such a price as false- 
hood is continually wringing from her votaries. It is 
a dizzy precipice they walk, with both eyes watching 
for what the eyes of men may catch in their unsteady 
steps, to betray their falsehood ; they cannot wrestle 
with an adversary, for the traitor within has made 
them weak ; they cannot reach up to the blessings 
which angels bring and offer to all who can attain 
them, for the narrow and crooked path of their souls 
demands eternal vigilance, or it leads to instant ruin. 
A brave man may well decline such perils, and take the 
path of even outlawed new truth with its heroic dangers 
but divine rewards ; ay, and whose dangers are them- 
selves rewards invigorating his soul. 

Herein again is revealed the Divinity of Truth 
in the Strength which it imparts. It is proverbially 
mighty ; it gives strength as an element of personal 
character, as a bond of assurance in the social nature, 
as a ruling and mastering power in the civil compact 
of communities and nations. 

He who obeys the law stands tempest proof. The 
truth that makes him free makes him strong, for it gives 
him a certain equipoise from which to hurl forth his 
strength and make it available. He can fling out his 
arms in a vigorous struggle without imperiling his 
standing, and deal great battle strokes without losing 



The Divinity of Truth. 45 

his centre. He can stoop to draw up the fallen from 
the pit of error, or loss, or from the degradation to 
which others have trodden them, and set them on the 
high levels of virtue and honor, nor finds his own brain 
spinning with a vertigo at the performance. If you 
find him with publicans and sinners, you will not count 
him as one of them, but know that his great nature has 
work there, and is not deterred by fear of contagion 
from fulfilling his utmost duty to the erring and the 
sinful. 

There is nothing in nature that is not more upright 
for his integrity. The very knave who would rob him 
for his apparent simplicity, still respects him for his 
incorruptible honesty, and when an hour comes, as 
come it may, that social ruin, and social disaster are 
ready to crush the commonwealth and overwhelm soci- 
ety for the lack of one true man at the head of a sink- 
ing state, the craven, false and evil men themselves will 
crown him with their suffrages, and set him in the 
"imminent perilous breach" to lift up a standard 
against the common enemy. One true man, in a wil- 
derness of false and hollow man-shapes, jabbering and 
clamoring all around him, would be like the voice of 
God in chaos, a forming, compelling power, sovereign 
of all that subdued confusion, reducing all to the law 
of his integrity. The one fixed thing in a tumultuous 
world, he would become the calm centre of its unhar- 
nessed forces, the vital nucleus of a new creation, the 
conquering genius of a renovated world. 



46 The Divinity of Truth. 

From the inward peace of the true soul come out- 
ward calm and power ; the weakening - , wasting influence 
of doubt, care, despair and mental struggles with inbred 
foes, will cease when truth reigns in the soul, and the 
redeemed of her high ministry will stand up calm in 
faith, calm in deep founded hope whose low soft voice 
is then as full of irrevocable prophecy as the trump 
of the annunciative angel ! Unmoved amid the clash 
of warring thoughts and opinions, he will draw around 
him, by the majesty of his calm beauty, the troubled 
souls of an unresting world ; and beyond all his words, 
beyond all his deeds, he will be a living and life giving 
gospel of purity and peace by his very life and pres- 
ence. You have heard that the strength of our coun- 
try's renowned champion lay in that single element of 
sincere, outright, everlasting honesty and truthfulness 
which marked him from his childhood to his deathbed. 
Deeper than this, in one far greater than our country's 
saviour, in the character of our world's Saviour, this 
element of absolute integrity, this incarnation of divine 
truth wrought a strength to do, and dare and bear, 
which rose to such sublimity of greatness that the 
vassal ages but make broader his renown, and they 
who blot out the bright names of other heroes, add 
newer glories to his name as they go chained to his 
triumphal chariot. 

Is it nothing then, that one should choose the service 
of truth, the path of simple obedience to the noble in- 
stincts, and informing" laws, when so immeasurable and 



The Divinity of Truth. 47 

divine results are the consequence? Is it nothing that 
the weak vassal of delusion and lies should waste his 
scattered strength, for lack of this sweet bond of unity 
and power, and see his life's work sink to the blank 
abyss ; or, worse still, stand a shapeless monument of 
his unwise career, more monstrous for its magnitude ? 

Presuming that no one can for a moment hesitate in 
the final adjustment of the rival claims of truth and false- 
hood, however much the momentary interest may dis- 
pose him to neglect the higher eternal prize of integrity 
for the transient success of to-day, I will not prolong the 
topic of the utility of Truth, but present, as a closing 
view, the Divine nature of the essence, as further re- 
vealed by its Infinity. That it is excellent in its na- 
ture, strong in its influence, and essential to all right 
strength and excellence, is so certain to the reflective 
mind that one may well wonder why universal human- 
ity is not in eager, joyous search for its hidden wealth, 
and exulting in the glorious fruits of all past discoveries ; 
and a question rises, which has met more than once the 
broad negation of its demand as an answer, Is the field 
vast enough that all may be fed and none go famished 
from the faithful search ? The Bigot says, No ; all 
moral truth was exhausted ages ago, and the with- 
ered leaves of the tree of knowledge long since 
plucked up by the roots, lie pressed between the covers 
of my sacred book, Bible or Koran, Shaster, Vedas 
or Zendavesta. The weakling, mole-eyed soul of the 



48 The Divinity of Truth. 

School-man says, No ; the Truth was drawn dry from 
the bottom of its well centuries ago ; its last draught 
sparkled at the lips of Plato, and sank transformed into 
his soul. The Rogue says, No ; the truth is a delusive 
phantom whose shadowy image flutters everywhere, but 
whose living substance is found nowhere. The Priest 
says, In my diocese ; the Politician, In my party ; the 
Inventor, In my patent compound corn-sheller and axe- 
grinder. 

But with all due respect to the .Bigot, the Schoolman 
and the Rogue, with their several axes of church phi- 
losophy and self-interest to grind, while the patient 
world turns and turns, like the dull ass in his bark-mill, 
and never gets to the journey's end, I give my convic- 
tion to the testimony of the great souls who assert the 
infinity of Truth. Six thousand years have not abated 
the thirst for its newness, nor exhausted the significance 
of its first utterance. The song of the morning stars 
sounds as musically grand to-day as it sounded to the 
soul of the first man in the primeval wilderness of the 
world. The depth of the universe gives no token of 
bottom to the plummet-line of the most daring voyager ; 
the heights of God's throne are as inaccessibly grand 
beyond the foot-prints of the hardiest mountaineer on 
the bold summit of the proudest peaks of thought, as it 
rose over the humblest vale of green-nooked rural life, 
to the eyes of the shepherd kings of the East. Fear not 
to exhaust God's Infinite, which stretches on for the am- 
ple field of man's eternity. A soul that cannot rest from 



The Divinity of Truth. 49 

action, though it rest in action, going from thought to 
thought, from peak to peak, along the dazzling heights 
of an eternal progress, can only find an adequate orbit 
in an infinite field. The lover of light is called to a glo- 
rious mission, to lead off the march of unfettered souls 
along the glowing pathway of the heavens, treading the 
smooth pavements of the sky with undeviating strides, 
right on from starry truth to truth, laborious, faithful, 
fearless, and with eternal vigilance of keen-eyed caution, 
that no marsh-born meteor of the fancy, or wild fate-fire 
of the superstitious dream-power, may lure him from 
his golden track, which, aiming in its infinite ascent 
to the infinity unattainable, yet reaches unimaginable 
heights, bathed in the splendors of effulgent glory. 

Here as everywhere our duty is our interest. The 
Truth is mighty and will prevail. Buy it and sell it not ; 
hold it fast ; seek it ; find at all costs. If you have dis- 
covered the method, or the law, of gravitation, you will 
not be so demented with unreason, as to walk from the 
temple's pinnacle, trusting that some angel will bear you 
up, lest you dash your foot against a stone ; you will 
not tempt the Lord your God by so palpable and fatal 
a violation of his natural laws. What is folly in natural 
philosophy is equal folly in spiritual philosophy. If you 
will not tempt your fate in open neglect of physical 
laws, how dare you challenge it in bold outrage against 
moral laws ? The crushing downfall is as certain to the 
uncentred soul as to the uncentred body, and in its results 
is as much more fatal, as a deformed soul is sadder than 
7 



50 The Divinity of Trtith. 

a mutilated body. The kind forces of nature soon melt 
the one into fresh air and living plant, but the immor- 
tality of the other prolongs the wound and aggravates 
the gloomy picture. 

Truth is Divine, Essential, Strong and Infinite. 
March on then in the light of her beauty, in the strength 
of her invigorating spirit, to search the infinity of her 
mysteries ; on, though you walk over the graves of the 
most reverend errors, and disturb the repose of the most 
crippled, gray and upholstered wrongs of antiquity. 
Track straight its iron path through the greenest pas- 
tures of pet falsehoods, and the ripest orchards of your 
cherished prejudices. There are fairer fields and sweeter 
fruits in the kingdom of Our Father. On for the ever- 
renewing prize of the never-ending labor, while cowards 
sink supine in the refuge of falsehood, and bigots are 
locked in the close prison of their own narrow thoughts ! 
Do you see that the world moves ? Assert it, and 
stand by your thought, though an infallible church 
deny it and shake anathemas over your head, though 
crowned heads denounce it, and point significantly to 
the gibbet, and fool-capped heads in humble echo of 
church and state deride it with their brazen tongues of 
folly and threaten the wrath of their mastering genius, 
and strong Mrs. Grundy set her face as a flint against it. 
Stand on your well-poised centre of eternal truth and 
keep the path, with your calm eye fixed on the sun ; 
follow his path of splendor, and demonstrate your own 
revolution. Old earth will spin in your behalf, kind- 



The Divinity of Truth. 51 

hearted, sturdy old nurse, and preach the truth you utter 
clear on its spinning axle; the stars in their courses 
shall fight against the mitred head, and the crowned 
heads, and the heads with symbol caps of folly. They 
and the indestructible old earth, whose question it is, 
will not murmur, will not fret, nor lose breath in inde- 
cent haste to be understood, but spin on calm and ma- 
jestic in their golden spheres and wait till men are wise 
enough to understand their secrets. 

Error must hasten to reap its reward, or the fruit 
falls worthless to a premature decay ; but Truth, the 
offspring of the everlasting soul, may wait and ripen 
through slow centuries, gaining vitality in every age 
and filling our hearts with delight from the first bud- 
ding of its blushing sweetness, to the full-orbed glory 
of its perfect fruit. 



OF GOD IN ALL THINGS. 



AUGUST, 1 8*6. 



OF GOD IN ALL THINGS, 

GOD IS LOVE. 



" The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God/' 
Doubt is at some stage of the soul's progress, as essen- 
tial to truth in its clearness as twilight is to the day. It 
is only to rare souls, and at rare intervals, that the full 
glory of a truth leaps, like a tropic sunrise, from utter 
darkness to the perfect day. For the most part we 
struggle painfully towards the light, touched now with 
pale, far streaks of the ascending glory, dim gleams of 
the uncertain truth which is our souls' sun, now glim- 
mered over by strange meteors, the North-lights' pallid 
torches waved dimly in the misty air, and often with 
no sure guide to tell us of the whitening darkness, to 
mark the realm of the Boreal frost-fires, or the warm 
life-waves of the orient light. 

Is it North, or is it East, when a gleam from the far 
camp-fires of invading science, lights up a path right 
through the temples and away from all our olden sancti- 
ties ? If we follow it, shall we meet the ever rising 
radiance in the Land of Palms, or find it shifting in wild 
war dances over the ice-crags of a barren skepticism ? 
Happy for us if the unsetting stars are out, the great 



56 Of God in All Things. 

first truths of Nature, and the Soul, round which the 
shifting heavens of thought revolve, that we may hold 
on our way sun- ward, truth- ward, ever in the right time, 
that so our doubts may be but melowed twilights of 
a perfect dawn. 

The Atheist who boldly denies the existence of a 
God, is a rare exception in a world of professed be- 
lievers, and not many of these exceptional men, are 
what they fancy and declare themselves to be. The 
Atheism of tongue and brain may exist with the deepest 
reverence and heart worship of all the goodness that 
the lips seem to deny. Nay, it is not rare, with 
those men, that their very goodness, and reverence for 
God, has made them deniers of the throned monster of 
some benighted creed wherein they chanced to be born, 
and which, while they know no other, is yet too revolt- 
ing to obtain their faith or subjugate their moral nature. 
The generous heart, before it has learned some possible 
reconciliation between the existence of evil and the 
omnipotence of God, must ever stand with trembling 
solicitude on the bleak verge of mental Atheism, though 
the pained heart prays for the very God that the best 
believer may pray to ; and this, his tearful want, in a 
mournful unbelief, is surely acceptable homage to that 
being who has made no hunger without a purpose 
to fill it. Such a denier is a worshiper nevertheless, 
who denies divinely the Divine and dethrones the only 
God he has heard of, because that divinity is not good 
enough to fill his aspirations. It is not of him that the 



Of God in All Things. 57 

words of my sacred text are spoken. He is the fool 
who saith in his heart, there is no God, though his lips 
may ache with their straining- hallelujahs. 

Of all the forms and degrees of unbelief, it is the 
atheism of the heart which is saddest and most deplora- 
ble. The brain may be at fault while the affections are 
right, and the whole nature will gently win back the will 
from the ways of error, but the soul that has grovelled 
till it loves the mire of its degradation, can never be 
restored by the workings of the intellect. The cold, 
phosphorescent glimmer of brain-light will no sooner 
reach the seated maladies of false affections, than the 
level glint of moonshine would dissolve the eternal ice- 
rocks of the Wetterhorn. 

What we love, we are, in some sort, and speedily 
grow to be in ever nearer relations. He who loves 
God, grows Godlike by his loving, though the bewil- 
dered brain may have been baffled by its own efforts to 
disentangle the knotted clue of life and death, of good 
and evil, woven, like warp and woof, in the most intri- 
cate figures of our being. By the same necessity the 
heart that is enamored of evil things, that shapes to its 
delight gross images and mere earthly pleasures, if not 
in the worst sense an Idolater, is still far nearer to the 
pit of Atheism, than the generous denier of a God, who 
lives the faith he cannot see. The most approved 
responses to the most orthodox catechism, the loudest 
amen to the longest prayer, and the fullest contribution 
to the Heathen fund, the Church-rates and Home Mis- 



58 Of God in All Things. 

sions, will not suffice to wipe out from the grovelling 
heart the taint of its Atheism. 

We have been so accustomed to look for God only in 
those things which please us, and flatter our petty wants 
and passions, that we forget his universal presence, and 
give up the broad realm of the disagreeable and injuri- 
ous to the hypothetical devil, which our narrow faith in 
God seems to make necessary. If once we were con- 
vinced of the supremacy of Good we should have no 
work or place for that kind of black, secondary omnipo- 
tence which we have enthroned over the realm of evil. 
A few, not mindless of the moral uses of suffering and 
wrong, give God a sort of left-hand glory in their exis- 
tence, attributing them to his vindicative will to punish 
the transgressor, not for a moment reflecting that the 
pang may be as truly a love-gift as the bliss. There is 
but one sunshine in the heavens, yet one plant drinks 
poison and another honey, from its golden light ; one 
creature grows to ruddy vigor, and another reeks to 
swifter corruption for its warm nurture. Can you not 
see then, how with one boundless, free and never- 
angered love, the divine life may produce in us a thou- 
sand and ten thousand diversified results, from all we 
dream of Heaven to all we dread of Hell, the sole 
cause of the diversity being in our mobile natures, not 
in any shifting moods of the Immutable. Here in one 
disappointed vanity which we call grief, lies one of the 
strong-holds of veritable Atheism, whether we give up 
our faith at the challenge of sorrow, or, by our sorrow, 



Of God in All Things. 59 

give the scoffer grounds to overthrow our faith. Yet who 
am I, or who are you, to say to the creator of our lives, 
Thus much we have a right to claim, and for nothing 
less will we give one breath of praise, or condescend to 
be delighted with any good thing possessed, or any 
hope of the future. I seem to hear great nature say to 
such with a pitying smile, My little ones, bite on your 
corals ; you will find this pain bearing you pearls one 
day for use of better biting. Because my benefactor 
gave me bread, must he give me honey, on pain of my 
stubbornly going hungry ? Remember this, the honey 
of bread is the sweat that earns it, and no law could be 
more bountiful and kind than the law of recompense. 
Then turn to the world of sin and suffering, and you 
will find that every pang was bought by the race before 
it was suffered, that every delight lay in the path of an 
eternal causation as the price of so much right work, 
and rigid justice metes out the general reward and 
holds the universal balance. But the individual suffers 
for the wrong of the foregone sinner, and here grim 
denial clutches, as at the golden chain let down by 
Jupiter from Olympus, in eager attempt to drag the 
Eternal down, and shake the throne of God. Yes, the 
child suffers for his Father's sin ; but, mark well, the 
reward of suffering is his own, his the deeper wisdom 
and the wider love, the keener sense of all that can de- 
light the life, the progress which only by such a spur 
could come to such a nature. Thus while Justice rules 
the universal, Love reigns over the individual. He is 



60 Of God in All Things. 

seemingly forgotten in the vast providences which work 
out divine ends through human history ; but when the 
hour of fruition comes, the pensioner of God leaps up 
for joy that he could suffer in behalf of the universal 
good, only to reap the personal benefit of an eternal 
bounty. 

No man, though he should never catch one murmur 
of the under-harmony that runs through the world's dis- 
cord, nor see one positive blessing grow from sorrow or 
loss, may justly doubt the presence of an Almighty God 
in every fact of life, till he has seen the absolute ultima- 
tion of every fact. I have a right to my faith in God, if 
I see among the works of his hands anything positively 
good. Do I know that life in its best estate is good ? 
Then I know that its cause, or vital centre, is not evil, 
and that, in its worst estate, it tends to the fulfillment of 
a beneficent purpose. An absolute evil is not converti- 
ble to good in itself, nor can it produce good fruit. If 
love, and thought, and joy and the delights of life are 
good, their source must be good as well. If these are 
the sounds and measures of a life set musically to the 
law of life, we can scarely imagine a condition of things 
in which the reverse of all these blessings should not be 
the result of transgressing that law. The justice of the 
law then, is good and justified, though we looked not to 
the merciful meaning of its very penalties. 

To illustrate how evil is not absolute and is but the 
necessity of unfinished good, look at the structure of 
the human mind. We are composed of elements which, 



Of God in All Things. 61 

in separate development, would be direct antagonisms, 
but in whose combination is produced the highest har- 
mony. Alone they result in that jarring and painful ex- 
perience which we call evil ; united, though their several 
natures are the same, their composite result is truth, har- 
mony, peace, good. In the million-fold varieties of finite 
life, there must be every possible degree of progressive 
development, some elements prominent in one and others 
in others, so that it would be doing no violence to a 
plausible theory to imagine the aggregate result as a 
vast harmonious whole, a race complete in its perfection 
of humanity, though not a single individual in the race 
was moulded to the divine model. I do not say that 
such is the fact to the eyes of God, for only the Infinite 
can fathom the works of the Infinite, but I do believe 
that to the loftier souls who have gone up from Earth to 
the eminent heights of a diviner sphere, as they gaze 
back over the discords of the life they left, these seem 
to be melting into harmony, and the great aggregation 
of feelings, hopes, passions and desires, loves and hates 
and all the elemental essences of the ideal man, are 
represented in the whole race in such proportionate de- 
velopment as would approximate to the image of the 
whole Man. We may say with a certain propriety that 
Humanity is a man, a child almost with his stumblings 
and his small experience, yet as a whole, not at all the 
shapeless monster he would seem, from the amassing 
of such elements as we find him composed of. Take 
the disintegrated components of a brain, as classed by 



62 Of God in All Things. 

Modern Science, and see the social incarnation run riot 
in the most lawless and shameless libertinism, the pro- 
genitive love lavish its sickly sentiment on curs and dolls 
and every idle fancy, the home love vegetate and strike 
root in a barren soil, without one pulse of animate ambi- 
tion to lift it above the rank weeds that fatten by the 
way-side ; see spendthrift Benevolence fling all its wealth 
on worthless objects, and abject Reverence bow to the 
base gods of its rank unreason, while theft, revenge and 
murder grow from the divorced trinity of thrift, jus- 
tice and vengeance, and thus through some five and fort) 
organs of a perfect brain, see five and forty separate 
Devils, with as many distinct characteristics, all ready to 
devour one another with their mutual antagonisms. 
Who that should see them thus separately incarnated, 
could imagine, from the stand-point of any one of them, 
that the whole combined in the precise projections of 
their actual development, composed a man serene and 
perfect, and beautiful of soul and mind ? But when the 
five and forty fragments are brought together in one 
close community, their passions and propensities so play 
off against each other, that their civil code of necessity 
becomes the law of a true life, and while each individual 
was a torment to himself and fellows, the whole society 
gives us the picture of a harmonious organism, reined 
in by their mutual necessities and rival passions. What 
is our large Humanity but such a congregation of frag- 
ments — and all our evils, what are they but the near-seen 
results of this partial development ? In the higher alti- 



Of God in All Things. 63 

tudes of being their jar comes mellower and more har- 
monious, as aloft in the mid-air all sounds of the clamor- 
ing city are heard upon one key. The elements then, 
are good ; the total result is not so discordant as might 
seem, and it only remains to find in the individual a capa- 
city for and tendency to that proportioned combination 
which results in individual goodness and harmony. But 
nothing is more demonstrable in fact or clear in philos- 
ophy than this capability and tendency of the individ- 
ual to incorporate all the elements of the many. There 
is no brain that has not the rudimental organism of all 
that is greatest and best in the greatest and best of men. 
It is with souls as with heads ; the physical is type of 
the mental, the mental of the spiritual. Every excel- 
lence that shines in the character of the sainted and holy, 
lies germinal in the soul of the wicked and outcast. 
The wicked are brought out of sin by the destruction of 
no organic faculty ; but by the rousing of the dormant 
ones. As far as creation has progressed, every atom of 
power and faculty is put where it should be, and to make 
Humanity perfect, it demands no reconstruction or demo- 
lition of the existing parts, but the completion of the 
undeveloped. The thief has no larger acquisitiveness 
than the great financier, the murderer no larger destruc- 
tiveness than the successful pioneer and founder of em- 
pires, the spendthrift no more active benevolence than a 
Howard or a Fry ; but they severally lack the fullness of 
those other faculties which harmonize the mind, which 
harness centrifugal and centripetal in one team to whirl 



64 Of God in All Things. 

the jarring worlds in their perfect orbits. Here then in 
brief suggestion is a solution to that problem most fruit- 
ful of all in practical atheism. All evil is the product 
of partial development and disappears in the ultimation 
of the divine plan. 

We know by comparative philosophy, what the soul 
knows by intuition^ that every part has its purpose, and 
the presence of a germ is the prophecy of a flower and 
fruit. If the rude man has a show of moral and mental 
organism, we know that there was intended all that cul- 
ture and growth can produce of human perfection. If 
even the dull dog has rudimental mind, we know that to 
the utmost of canine culture that dog is endowed with 
capacity, and if we are not willing to accord him a 
compensative sphere to complete the deficiencies of this, 
it is only because we have not seen in his race that germ 
of prescience which marks in immortal beings, their no- 
bler destiny. 

While the experience of every man who has at all de- 
veloped the capacities that are in him, proves that what 
we call evil is inherent only to the transitional state, and 
the eternal goal is good and yet more good, the pres- 
ence of God is clear even in the very evil itself. It has 
seemed a paradox of blind faith to put in the mouth of 
the All-Father those words of the Record which make 
him the Creator of light and darkness, the Maker of 
good and evil. Yet the supremacy of God is not limited 
by the blue walls of Heaven ; it reaches down to the 
lowest Hell, it holds in strict surveillance the darkest 



Of God in All Things. 65 

souls that wander forlornly in the deserts of despair, or 
madly dash their impious foreheads on the bosses of 
His buckler. 

To those whose privilege it is to clasp two worlds in 
one conscious embrace, nay more, to stand between two 
worlds on the green glory of the third, who from the 
warm precincts of the luminous height can pierce the 
nether darkness of the unrisen souls, and clasp the 
hands of those struggling yet in swaddling-bands of sin, 
the ultimate destiny of all is clearer, and a road is seen 
steep though it be at first, winding upward, still up for- 
ever, for the grand exodus of all souls from their house 
of bondage. Through the gold fringes of the dark are 
seen dim hands lifted for sympathetic aid, and laborious 
slow emergence of benighted beings from their shrouds 
of sin, and the chambers of perdition, till their feet are 
set firmly upon the radiant pavement of the empyrean 
light. Such souls may well look back upon their pain- 
ful path, and thank God for the pang through which 
they have arrived to heights of being that were impossi- 
ble to such a nature without such tuition. Their pass- 
ing torments were but the hunger-throes which give an 
eternal zest to the eternal feast of good and onward 
aspiring. How the old agony thrills in the mellower 
cadence of the gratulative song, a joy forever. What 
choral bursts of jubilant thanksgiving roll the full 
diapason to the throne of life, deeper and more melodi- 
ous for the long pulses of forgotten sobs. So the far 
storms that rend mid ocean with terrific blasts, roll on 



66 Of God in All Things. 

the green shore the green waves, glory crested, in a 
psalm of modulated thunder. Let not the Shadow of 
Evil then, stand between us and our faith in God. The 
harmony which runs through all else is not broken here, 
when you rise high enough to see the end from the 
beginning. When the heart opens to the sun of life, as 
a fair flower to the morning, it sheds its folly, as the 
swelling germ its shell, and says no longer that there 
is no God, but rather, How good was that night oi 
darkness and winter which made so grand the dawn of 
this summer day. 

Tracing our theme in the progress of thought we 
find the divine nature developed in things in the three- 
fold manifestation of Power, Wisdom and Love, corre- 
sponding to their three great elements of Grandeur, 
Harmony and Goodness. When baffled thought 
shrinks from the contemplation of the vastitude of 
Being, vibrant with one pulse of life through the inter- 
minable stellar spaces, and reaching down to incon- 
ceivable minuteness, with myriad forms of complicated 
organisms below the power of our keenest vision, the 
dullest heart is not without some awe, the heaviest slow 
thought moves with some sense of the greatness of the 
Infinite Life-giver. 

Power is the lowest form of divine expression, that 
which is most obvious to the rudest mind, and which 
sends a thrill of glad free daring down the pulses of the 
very child, while yet he shudders at its startling exhibi- 
tions. Hence among savage tribes, the simple children 



Of God in All Things. 67 

of the civic family, the first God is the Almighty, and 
grinding, crashing, downright Energy, that can spin 
worlds like humming-tops, and unroll the heavens as a 
starry banner fluttering in his breath, is the true type of 
that All-mightiness. The omnipotence of God, in this 
point of view, is a theme which if it were not infinite, 
would long since have been exhausted, for the percep- 
tion of its obvious truth depends on no acuteness of the 
mind ; the less one knows, the greater seems the little 
that he sees, and the more one knows, though he were 
an archangel, the vaster seems the world of the un- 
known. Power is the revelation of God to the senses. 
If He were merely the Almighty, the mind and the 
heart would be without a divinity ; for mere strength 
can excite no feeling of love, or that sense of mental 
delight, which must ever recognize the presence of law to 
feel enough of security to insure pleasure. We might 
suppose even that if God were merely the Almighty, 
soul and heart could not exist beyond the merest brute 
instincts ; for we could scarcely imagine that a power 
which cannot excite an affection, can produce it, or 
would produce it, since love delights only in the lovely. 
It is fitting that the sensuous development of the reli- 
gious nature should precede all others ; for man is first 
a child of the senses, a creature of animal wants, and 
instincts, whose very love in its rude, first opening is 
little else than the instinct of self-preservation. 

The demonstrations of divine being can only be 
appreciable in kind, the forceful by the strong, the intel- 



68 Of God in All Things. 

ligent by the wise, the beneficent by the loving. Thus 
in all ages and stages of progression, God is made 
manifest to men, the infinite fullness of just that which 
they are. When the frontal brain grew larger, and the 
scope of thought extended, the old image was not 
adequate to the new powers of mind, but the universe 
was still a revelation of all that the mind of man could 
require. The glorious symmetry of the Work was 
vocal with the praises of the Worker's Wisdom. The 
grand anthem of the universe, from the round dew-drop 
to the orbed star, sent rhythmic grandeur throbbing 
through the soul, and rhymed the potential energies of 
nature with the symmetric cadences of beauty. Order 
sat throned in life, and life in all, and not a grass-blade 
drank green glory from the triune light, that did not 
whisper to the open soul the embodied wisdom of 
the Triune God. From order, symmetry, or law, is but 
one step to beauty ; but one step more from beauty to 
Love. The affections, of whatever kind, are based on 
a high sense of the grace and harmonious development 
of their object. Yet the first step of the progress 
could not be taken, if the creator, or the creature were 
merely strong and wise. The keenest appreciation of 
method and order would never make one flutter of the 
sense of Beauty. Pure intellect would scan the volup- 
tuous contour of Venus emerging rosy and white from 
the enamored sea, with the same critical delight that it 
would gaze upon the crimsoned peaks of an iceberg 
flashing in the horizontal sun. But God will not be 



Of God in All Things. 69 

denied, even by the Intellect. The overwhelming gran- 
deur of his works, makes painful the deep awe which 
they inspire, till intellect comes to the relief of man and 
attempting to set aside the preponderant Terror which 
the God of ignorance must ever be, it finds itself en- 
snared in the subtle web of an infinite harmony, a 
universal fitness of everything for its place and purpose. 
There appears such an endless dependence of every 
part upon the grand whole that has gone before it, that 
Intellect must bow and worship, confessing that in the 
very monad of countless ages agone, was set the mark 
of a predetermination which no anatomist of nature 
can deny, and the whole series of advancing develop- 
ment demonstrates. Thus the harmony of things be- 
comes the revelation of God as a being of Wisdom, to 
the mind of man in its intellectual nature, as their great- 
ness was the announcer of His Omnipotence to the 
sensate mind. 

But higher than all preached gospels hitherto, and 
crowning all the Wisdom, and the Power, God's noblest 
witness and evangelist is Love ; that love which Paul, 
by name of Charity, calls greatest of all gifts. Our 
human love is the far flutter of the great pulses of 
God's love, the systole of his mighty heart, felt to the 
remotest arteries of being. A child, a woman, a lover, 
can never be an Atheist, let their creed be what it may ; 
they cannot with the fool, say in their hearts, There is 
no God. The noble and generous heart, warm with a 
comprehensive love for its fellow and its race, might 



70 Of God in All Things. 

teach its possessor to leap all intermediate steps of slow- 
paced reason, and put forth his fine syllogism in one 
short sentence. I love ; therefore there is a God and a 
God of love. The most audacious materialist would feel 
that he was treading too close to the biting lashes of 
irrepressible ridicule, though he had no wholesome 
dread of God's heavier scourge, if he should assert 
frankly that affection was a chemical compound with 
fixed equivalents, and its own unvarying atomic weight, 
that so much oxygen and azote and such propor- 
tions of sulphur and calcium, went to the composi- 
tion of such and such feelings, and produced by their 
various combinations the endless shades of thought, 
and modifications of love. Set him at his alembics, and 
when the evolving gases have eliminated an article of 
pure affection, or even but an indifferently developed 
love, we will put our laggard humanity in his hands, to 
evaporate and re-crystallize according to the strictest 
laws of elective affinity. But till he has done some- 
thing of that sort, and put his bottled feelings on exhi- 
bition in the lecture-room where all may test their 
warmth and strength, we will look reverently to a 
deeper and higher source for this fullest expression of a 
vital soul. As there can be no gravitation without 
some centre, so there can be no love without an implied 
object. Centre and object may be unseen, but these two 
affinities work blindly to their legitimate ends, as surely 
as by conscious forethought. By the operations of the 
one we are led to the physical centre of the system and 



Of God in All Things. 7 1 

the universe, by the equally significant gravitation of 
the other, we find clear indications of the great spiritual 
centre. He was more than strong who named the 
second embodiment of God the Logos or Wisdom. 
He was more than wise who in the dawning of his last 
revelation said, God is Love. Love is fellowship ; but 
fellowship is only one point ; its essential peculiarity is 
unity of differences on this one thread of likeness. 
This marks its beauty in the relation of man and 
woman, of parent and child, of strong and weak, of the 
angels and humanity on the one hand, of humanity and 
the brutes on the other. While then it may be said to 
look with level eyes on all things, as to its own kith and 
kin, it still looks up in worship and delightful awe to its 
heavenly source, looks down in pity and sweet helpful- 
ness to the poor and needy, and forth with vision 
unabashed, unlifted, to the eyes of its own equal, while 
either hand reaching from the lofty to the lowly, folds 
both as one to its own heart of hearts. 

There is no creatural affection so far down the scale 
of being that it does not embrace something lower. 
Then beneath all sentience must lie an undeveloped 
world, for there is no gravitation into vacuity. We 
yearn only toward that which is, though we may know 
nothing of the manner of its being. So there is no 
creature so high that his affections reach not up, forever 
up, to some divine object. It may be a fantasy, or a 
dream ; but that aspiration itself is prophecy, and that 
blind tendency, like the northern flight of birds beyond 



/ 



Of God in All Things. 



the arctic ice, proves that still higher is an open world 
of life and regeneration. Love then in this large sense 
of relational essence, is the electric of moist, warm 
hands, reaching from the first monad of impassioned 
life, with all the uncreated mass below, up to the highest 
of derivative being, with the Creative Essence over all, 
which so throbs down the vital chain on infinite pulses 
of invisible fire, melts the crude mass into organic life 
and lifts it up atom by atom, to become the temples of 
the soul. One protest against this chain of being, by 
which our obvious relationship ultimates in God, is 
advanced, not by the unbeliever, but by the believer. 
The objector tells you that there is an infinite distance 
between life and no life, between highest creatural exis- 
tence, and creative essence, and thus the chain is dis- 
solved by an infinite gap at both ends. But we know 
in fact that the chasm is bridged at both ends, by our 
conscious or unconscious relationship, the downward 
and upward expansion of our affections. We are 
bound by a thread of likeness, as evinced by what we 
call our likings to the humblest forms of being, from the 
sparry crystal to the green grass and the flower, ascend- 
ing, and growing nearer as they ascend, to the level of 
our own personal growth, from which the larger love 
grows up with purer pulses, ever more spiritual and 
divine, till it soars in glad awe up to the infinite Ocean 
of Love. The intimate connection between the highest 
revelation of the deity and the noblest element of our 
human nature, is fruitful of suggestion and eminently 



Of God in All Things. 73 

instructive to the thoughtful soul. Nothing could more 
beautifully enforce the lessons of universal charity, even 
to souls disposed to a sordid selfishness, since the 
broader we stretch out our arms of relationship, the 
fuller shall be the incoming of the divine life, which 
works through this element its creative purposes. And 
as the idea of God has been parallel to the develop- 
ment of man as a race, a nation, or an individual, we 
have a right to look for nobler images of the one great 
Incomprehensible, as the soul of man goes up to 
nobler heights of progress. This will induce feelings 
of charity and liberal fellowship toward the earnest 
souls of every creed, while it warns us to be cautious 
of stamping any system, or thought with the seal of 
ultimate truth. 

With our faith cemented by the very feelings which 
had shaken it, we shall find life a divine gift indeed. 
The transient evil shall give way before the clearer rev- 
elations of the supremacy of God. On our right hand 
and on our left we shall feel the Almighty as a buckler 
and an arm of power, the Omniscient as a guide and 
law, while all around, above, below, and through our 
heart of hearts, the essence of the All-loving Father 
shall flow like the impalpable air, a life in life and death, 
a light in the day and the dark, a joy in our joy and 
grief, and the everlasting love and reward of our ever- 
lasting aspirations. 



THE INWARD PEACE, 

SEPTEMBER, 1856. 



THE INWARD PEACE. 



" I have seen 
A curious Child, who dwelt upon a tract 
Of inland ground, applying to his ear 
The convolutions of a smooth-lipped Shell ; 
To which, in silence hushed, his very soul 
Listened intensely ; and his countenance soon 
Brightened with joy ; for murmurings from within 
Were heard, — sonorous cadences ! whereby, 
To his belief, the Monitor expressed 
Mysterious union with his native Sea. 
Even such a Shell the Universe itself 
Is to the ear of Faith ; and there are times, 
I doubt not, when to you it doth impart 
Authentic tidings of invisible things ; 
Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power ; 
And central peace subsisting at the heart 
Of endless agitation. Here you stand, 
Adore and worship, when you know it not ; 
Pious beyond the intention of your thought ; 
Devout above the meaning of your will." 

Far back in the dim past I see a group of swart 
Chaldean shepherds, gathered upon a mound that over- 
looks, not the broad plains only, where their flocks are 
folded and asleep, but the broad heavens where the 
universal Shepherd has led out his starry flocks to wan- 



78 The Inward Peace. 

der over the unbounded prairies of the impurpled air 
From word to word and thought to thought, the speech 
of the overawed, large-hearted, simple-minded watch- 
ers wanders away from earth, their sleeping flocks, 
and the wide air below the moon, over a vastitude of 
wondering thought, wide as the fenceless realm where 
Mazzaroth comes in his season, and Arcturus and his 
sons lead forth their burning hosts, and the Lamb pas- 
tures with the Ox in the broad circle of the Zodiac. 

They have heard from the gray fathers of the world, 
that the same immutable motions and unchanging 
change were there ; the same bright hosts, in the same 
burning rhymes, sang the mysterious canticles of power 
and love and light, marched the weird marches of their 
mystic round, unjarring through the diapason of the 
spheres ; and now their throbbing heads press the 
earth, and their souls say, what their dumb lips could 
never annunciate : " Oh, Power Almighty ! that can 
chain mutation to a moveless centre, and fill the uni- 
verse with silent Life, and Life with deathless Love, — 
Almighty, we adore thee ! " 

Ah, they have put the concave heavens to their ears, 
as the boy put his murmuring shell, and the " sonorous 
cadences " impart such glimpses of the great deep on 
which the Spirit of God moved in the beginning, that, 
mute with the depth of their unspeakable thoughts, 
they can only bow and worship. Kindred to these, but 
coming into contact with Nature more through the intel- 
lect than reverence or affection, I behold the astrono- 



The Inward Peace. 79 

trier, of old the astrologer, who, seeking to unwind 
the wrappings of mystery which invailed our life, did 
verily found the science which has grappled the stars 
and weighed them in its hand. 

He has graduated the blue vault of heaven like the 
dial of a watch, where sun and moon and stars, and the 
law-bound disorder of the planets, are but the index 
hands to measure the manifold cycles ; from the earth's 
shadowy finger pointing its daily round, to the immea- 
surable marches of the starry sun-fires, that, sweeping 
off and away forever, keep the unstriking Ages of 
Eternity. But the same lesson comes to him, change 
that is fixed to an unswerving centre, seeming discord 
ravelled back, till its confused threads run clear, strung 
with perpetual harmony, — till even the keen brain wor- 
ships, and he sees the drooping heavens as a deep-blue 
robe of God's High Priest, whose musical bells are the 
chiming stars. Henceforth the undevout astronomer 
were mad indeed, as blind as mad, if he caught not the 
meaning of that infinite central peace, the eternal stabil- 
ity in the unstable and shifting. " Is there a God?" his 
keen brain asked, and his full heart responded, " Ay, 
an Almighty God, and lovely as almighty." " Is there 
a Soul?" "Ay, to the very heavens which we have 
called a blank, a power of peace that governs and reins 
in the vast and only less than infinite power which 
hurls the universe through space." Was it ever said, or 
did you ever think, that all stars are falling stars ? And 
yet they are, rushing together with a ruinous and ever 



80 The Inward Peace. 

more accelerated speed. The astronomer knows it, 
and can weigh the rushing masses, and compute the 
inevitable crash, which, but for one compelling and con- 
servative force that wheels them out in never-failing 
orbits, would anon confound the universe in ruin. By 
all that this catastrophe is terrible to contemplate, his 
heart is taught a grateful faith and trust in the calm 
Power that still preserves us. 

The moral of nature here is not less positive than are 
the assurances of the written Word : "The Lord reign- 
eth, he is clothed with majesty ; the Lord is clothed 
with strength, wherewith he hath girded himself: the 
world also is established, that it cannot be moved." 
"The heavens declare his righteousness, and all the 
people see his glory." But more than to the man 
of science, more than to the simple child of wonder on 
the Chaldeans' hills, this universe becomes to the true 
poet a mystic shell, full of the cadences of its eternal 
Ocean, the infinite God, the immeasurable Calm of 
Power and Peace in which it lives and moves and has 
its being. He is at once the rhythmic speaker and the 
rhythmic doer. His steps keep time to his harp, and 
his harp keeps the tune of the morning stars. To him 

" the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that too often lie too deep for tears." 

When the wrath of Winter has torn off the last 
green leaf from all the glorious woods, he sees the 
new year folded on the grim destroyer's bosom, and 
knows that God and beauty and the life of things have 



The Inward Peace. 81 

not been startled from this wintry world. Were he 
wise if, knowing that the year survived its stormy 
foe, and its own chill death-likeness, he doubted for 
the alienated soul ? 

They who mourn that, though flower and grass 
return again to deck the world of graves, the dear souls 
whose vestures perish there return no more to gladden 
us, are not right poets, for they break the measured 
stanzas of Nature between the very rhymes. 

When she pronounces the eternal life that underlies 
the eternal changes of her transient forms, she were but 
a poor expression of the great Poet, the Maker, God, 
if she said not the match-line to that verse, that under 
the transient vestures of our souls the still life works, 
forever, and even the alienated soul shall find a spring- 
time, and new green, new hopes, and life's rejuvenes- 
cence. 

Of old the vocation was one, of Poet and of Prophet, 
the seer of earth's hidden harmonies, and the occult 
harmonies of the imperfect human soul. They who 
read wisely in the works of God knew that discord was 
superficial, not a portion and integral attribute of His 
creation. For even a little that one sees this, he is so 
far a poet ; for even the little that he speaks it, he is 
insomuch a prophet. To his ear, the murmur ol the 
universal want, earth's hungry wail and the soul's cry 
for bread, are indeed " sonorous cadences" that tell him 
of the infinite nature of that soul, insatiable and ever 
longing after more. 



82 The Inward Peace. 

" Though inland far he be," in the calm valley of a 
sweet content, or on the mountain peaks of a large 
faith, 

" His soul hath sight of that immortal sea 

Which brought us hither, 

Can in a moment travel thither, 
And see the Children sport upon the shore, 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." 

But, if even our discords, our despairs and wants, are 
as the murmurs in the ocean shell, to teach the infinite 
origin of the soul and the deep peace to which its long- 
ings tend, how much more grandly must that lesson 
gleam from all the high, heroic, holy deeds and thoughts 
that stand already where these longings point. Our 
martyrs and apostles, the true men and women who in 
an age of wrong and evil, and among the very legions 
of the enemy, keep yet the whiteness of their virgin 
souls untainted, and the uprightness of their hearts un- 
bowed, — it asks no poet to interpret the divine signifi- 
cance of their lives, no prophet to reveal the heaven 
which is and must be their reward. 

Every willing heart shall be recipient of the. lesson, 
and 

" Deep below the darkness and the storm, 
The oppression of the tumult, wrath and scorn, 
The tribulation, and the gleaming blades," 

shall sleep the "central peace subsisting at the heart 
of endless agitation." If one were startled to behold 
the seeds of dissolution in the almost infinite heavens. 



The Inward Peace. 83 

how much more startling are the suggestive sin and 
evil that corrupt the souls of men. 

To us, who, yet in the bonds of the flesh, cannot 
clearly trace the ultimate good to which God's silent 
alchemy sublimes our very evil, it is fearful to con- 
template, and even to the Souls redeemed from death 
and raised by death above the transient discords of the 
eternal earth, it must be too often a subduing thought, 
which only a more faithful contemplation can melt off to 
sunny cheerfulness. 

But highest Souls are never shadowed by a doubt. 
From the star-crowned steeps of eternity they can look 
down smiling on the woes of earth, for far beyond, in 
the opposing heavens, they see the image of those trou- 
bled souls carried into the realms of purity and peace. 

Or say, earth's misty air is but a convex lens to bring 
the distant future of her sons into the troubled field of 
their present ; and the eye which would have moistened 
at their sorrow in the Vale of Trial, gladdens at all 
they will be on the green, broad mountain-tops of Vic- 
tory. Amidst the " ebb and flow" we see the " ever- 
during power." Day follows night, and the dark moon 
refills her crescent horn, the perished years revive in 
their ever-returning springs, and yellow harvests roll 
their golden waves over the plains that foamed in deadly 
white beneath the breakers of the drifted snow. 

Slowly the never-resting equinoxes roll back upon the 
dial-plate of the ages, as the retreating shadow reeled 
from the prophet's voice upon the dial of Ahaz, a sign 



84 The Inward Peace. 

from God of the returning golden age, when Leo, the 
Lion, shall lie down with Aries, the Lamb, and the 
child of the Virgin shall lead their vernal train. 

The far-off stars, that for so many an age have 
seemed eternal in their mutual relations, types of im- 
mutable forms, tell us at once that nothing is fixed, 
chained down and permanent, and yet nothing can es- 
cape, but must fulfil its destined sphere. 

All go in waves, from the air that palpitates with 
these low-uttered words to the star-sparkling phospho- 
rescence of the universal deep, dashing its golden bil- 
lows on some far continent of eternity, where their 
white spray stretches an interminable line along the 
Milky-way. Well might we shudder at the ruin, if the 
same vision that discerns the breaking up of the starry 
congregations, did not also discern their whitherward, 
sphered by the central power, the eternal never-chang- 
ing force, which makes the whirling orbs a universe. 
That central calm remains inviolate when seeming Ruin 
drives her conquering chariot through the heavens ; as 
once Boadicea, the "scourged Icenian queen, through the 
square legions drove her rattling car," though under her 
" burning wheels the steadfast empyrean shake through- 
out, all but the throne itself of God," that throne remains 
immutable. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my 
word shall not pass away, saith the Lord. This, then, 
is the right significance of that central peace subsisting 
at the heart of endless agitation ; it is that Peace of God 
which surpasses the unsanctified understanding. 



The Inward Peace. 85 

We are, indeed, but as curious children toying with 
the world, if the universal murmur that salutes our ear 
bring not its deeper sense, "the authentic tidings of in- 
visible thin£s." And while we read in visible nature the 
records of that central peace which all the stormy ages 
cannot jar, it does especially behoove us, as immortal 
souls who seek repose and strength at once, to grapple 
with the thought and wring that secret from the grasp 
of nature, to wrestle with the angel of our destiny till 
we compel him so to bless us that he reveal his divine 
Mystery of Married Power and Peace. 

Power that is noisy, ruinous and fierce, we have too 
plentiful for earth's repose ; tyrannic power that crushes 
what it touches ; ambitious power that treads on human 
hearts to climb into its place ; and the grim sorcery 
of bigot power, that shakes the terrors of its eternal 
hell over the shuddering souls it would subdue. 

And we have idle rest enough, a peace that is the 
base-born child of cowardice, a peace that is but impo- 
tence and pusillanimous fear, and the voluptuous repose 
of selfish Sybarites in a world of woe. Such rest and 
peace we ask not, and we would not have. But could 
we somewhere catch the key-note of the spheric mo- 
tions whereby they dance in boundless power and 
boundless harmony down the void spaces of the uni- 
verse, ah ! that were worthy of us all, worthy the noblest 
soul that has gone up into the realms of music and calm 
power. Some glimpses of that secret may break out 
through the weak words I breathe. To attune your 



86 The Inward Peace. 

souls for the inception of its great idea, go forth alone, 
or in harmonious fellowship with one or two, out from 
the grinding of your paltry cares, the dull clang of your 
ever-grinding wheels, the blurting breath of your iron 
slaves and fiery-throated dragons, that moan and snort 
and shriek in your mills and shops, and down your roar- 
ing roads, the very types of your restless surface-life ; 
go out from the clash of Mammon's silver hail, the 
Danae's golden rain upon your ringing counters, the 
snarl of angry politics in editorial sanctums, club-rooms, 
and deliberative halls, out from all these, and whatso- 
ever else mars the serenity of your ruffled souls, and 
standing under the silent stars, learn to be silent, 
patient, and unjarring. 

There you may faintly guess, and after long tuition 
under their mute, reproachful eyes, may catch with 
clearer apprehension the depth of philosophic truth that 
is struck by that plummet-line of my text-verse, the 
''central peace subsisting at the heart of endless agita- 
tion." 

The burning spheres rest in their motions because 
they are self-centred, poised to the minutest atom, and 
unresisting to the everlasting law. And they are strong 
because they rest ; such power uncentred would whirl 
down on its bickering axle to swift and irretrievable 
ruin ; such rest, without that power, would make the 
flat heavens stagnate in their burning calms, and crum- 
ble piecemeal down the cavernous voids ! 

Act, if ye would live ; obey, if ye would rest. The 



The Inward Peace. 87 

strength of all enduring strong things has its foundation 
in repose, in central peace, which is forever a measure 
of central purity. 

First pure, then peaceable, is the only path to that 
repose. In nature the integrity of the spheres must be 
maintained, or they jar. In the heart of man the whole- 
ness which is holiness is essential to his repose in ac- 
tion. The pure in heart, clear in head, and upright in 
unswervingness of purpose, not only see God, but shed 
God-like radiance of active good around them, and 
breathe an effluence of their inward heaven over the 
troubled bosoms that encircle them. True to the no- 
blest aspirations of his soul, a man will grow strong by 
that very truth ; and his uprightness, like the columnar 
basis of a tower, will give at once rest on its proper 
centre which hangs aplumb over the centre of the 
sphere, and strength by that very weight which would 
have crushed the leaning- structure. 

It is thus that peace and power are cumulative, when 
they are true ; and in this distinguished from all false 
rest, or evil power, that they expand like equal wings 
with simultaneous growth. With such paired vans was 
borne aloft the Egyptian's winged globe, type of the 
poised and circling universe. With such wide wings the 
herald angels winnowed the trackless air, to gladden 
earth with promises of heaven in the green lustre of her 
infancy. On the broad vans of mated power and peace, 
springing from the firm breast of central purity, the as- 
cending soul will take its starward flight, when the frail 



88 The Inward Peace. 

mortal puts on immortality, and man becomes an angel 
among angels. 

The moral of the outward world is again repeated by 
the written word, for the kindled lips of Isaiah said : 
"The work of the righteous shall be peace, and the 
effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance for- 
ever." On the reverse, all nature with its pangs and 
penalties, all history with its beacon fires and signal 
providences, and the whole tenor of the sterner pro- 
phets declare : " There is no peace, saith my God, to 
the wicked." 

The soul that hurls itself upon the buckler of Al- 
mighty Justice, shall be dashed in pieces with the same 
fatal certainty of ruin that awaits the body flung from 
the dizzying crags of Ararat. No wealth that he has 
piled up by wrong, no power that he has won by 
fraud, no honor plucked from stolen laurels to adorn his 
robber-brow, can interpose between him and the law. 
The silent everlasting law will work, and none shall 
hinder it. There is no crown for the transgressor. 

He is audacious, but he is not brave ; fool-hardy, 
rash and impious, but not courageous. A brave man 
scorns to do a conscious wrong. A man of courage is a 
man of heart, of natural goodness underlying his hero- 
ism. The bold transgressor is devoid of delicate honor 
as of generous love. He robs the poor, and smites the 
weak, and tramples on the helpless ; but no momentary, 
nay, nor age-long success can save him from the exe- 
crations of the outraged just ; the pity thus is keener 



The Inward Peace. 89 

than contempt ; and the pursuing of his own fell barking- 
passions, that shall only cease to tear him when they 
slink back for the more hungry leash of shame and self- 
contempt and merciless remorse ! 

x^h ! there is immeasurably more of peace in the scar- 
red bosom of his downstricken victim, in the very depth 
of his seeming defeat and desolation, than ever reached 
the heart of the victorious evil-doer. Victorious ? oh, 
struggling, sinful soul ! Seen from the standpoint of 
the higher spheres, there is no victory possible to evil ; 
what seems success on earth, is the inauguration of its 
more signal doom. 

You have piled up for your monument thick clouds 
from the smoke of burning towns and the exploding 
death-shots of your cannon, but they are thunder-clouds 
quick with the lightnings of impending retribution. 
You have climbed to unearned honors and a height due 
only to the better souls you dispossessed, but to plunge 
down more fatally in your headlong fall, and carry with 
you the exulting eye-glare of ten thousand thousand 
witnesses, drawn on you to a burning focus by your very 
eminence. You have compelled the homage of the 
noisy present, but the calm eternal future has nailed you 
to the ignominious gibbet by the mute pointing of its 
finger of scorn. Such is the memory of the wicked, 
such the unrest that gnaws the heart of the transgres- 
sor. It matters not whether you send him back to the 
God of the universe, or to the universe of God, to hear 
his verdict or learn the way of escape ; their two-fold 



90 The Inward Peace. 

language is alike, the utterance of the same condemna- 
tion, the rigid stretching of the same line of rectitude. 
The price of inward peace, perennial and green, is strict 
obedience, constant, firm, and hearty. 

Both Bibles harmonize in this : the Starry Scripture 
of that elder gospel of Creation, and the Written Word, 
or gospel of the Annunciation. 

Transgression in the spheres would be annihilation of 
the spheric order, annihilation of the universe ; for no 
infinity of lawless matter could make that unity of evolu- 
tion which determines the name of universe. Trans- 
gression under the spheres is the annihilation of sublu- 
nary order; and but for the presence of an Almighty 
Centre compelling the return of absent stars, of erring 
souls, the social and moral universe could never have 
survived the shock of evil. 

However sinful man may be, and the more sinful the 
more positive the assurance, that his race is not totally 
abolished in the wide clash of dissevered interests, 
proves the presence of that central peace, which is the 
soul of order, the Spirit of God, subsisting at the heart 
of endless agitation. By all the good that has survived 
our downfall, by all the better that we yearn and strug- 
gle for, we have assurance of that infinite Best, who shall 
sphere in our far transgressing lives to the calm circle 
of His holy influence, and melt the dissonance of all our 
myriad clamors into the music of the morning stars, a 
choral song of praise and gratulation. We have looked 
on this reharmonizintr and drawing of the soul into the 



The Inward Peace. 91 

realm of peace as a sort of moral gravity, a necessity at 
once of our natures and the relation we bear to our 
source as to a living centre. Think not that this figure 
leaves all to mechanical fate and teaches no personal 
duties. You all know the demands of that great natural 
law. If God is our centre, and moral gravitation is our 
law, by so much as we have of moral weight shall we 
tend toward Him; by so much as we are near to Him 
shall we be drawn more and more into his life-giving 
presence. A smaller soul that comes nearer to God is 
more controlled by His influence, weighs more in the 
divine balance, than a gigantic spirit in the far blanks of 
a selfish and godless eminence. This is strict natural 
law, and it conforms to the universal expression of moral 
law. To bring a wandered world back, then, to the 
spheric order of harmony and rest, where rest itself is 
active power, demands the denial of ambitious self, 
demands the culture of the moral nature, and a con- 
tinual approximation to the divine image. 

Self- forgetting, self-consuming, in a world too cold 
and dark, must be the price of a faithful life, the ordeal 
that wins the crown of victory, the olive-wreath of 
heavenly rest and peace. 

Earth's martyr age is a perpetual now. True souls 
are ever called to work and suffer ; but they find their 
inward peace even at the fiery stake, and under the bit- 
ter hail of stones and gun-shot from the black typhoon 
of a vengeful mob, the scowling thunder-cloud of an in- 
furiate church, or some power-drunken party. In 



92 The Inward Peace. 

body's pain, or that brief earth-life's loss, they walk 
serenely to their cross and crown, walk with unblanch- 
ing brow to their own world-illuminating auto-da-fe, with 
nature, as the elder prophets, still for antetype and 
teacher. See how the steadfast sun, calm in the centre 
of his whirling orbs, burns on in conquering peace, 
flooding the worlds with light, like the high-hearted 
martyr in the vortex of the boiling multitudes, whose 
luminous soul goes welling out in floods of prayer and 
praise. So the true soul rests amid the body's pangs ; 
so under the stormiest surges of impassioned humanity 
lies the deep hush of a religious thought, moves the 
deep under-tow of a spiritual progression. 

Its silent power no careless eye can measure, because 
it is so deep and silent ; because it works as God works 
in us, not by confused clamors, but by the potence of 
prevailing calm. This era of our world seems to be one 
peculiarly marked by the two-fold tides that set across it, 
the double silence and the double storm, that chase the 
world between them. Here we have, on the turbulent 
surface, the loud and fierce revolt against the majesty of 
truth, against the empire of the Prince of Peace, met by 
the thunderous onslaught of the warrior hosts who fight 
for God and freedom in their evil day ; while calm be- 
low them, in the death-torpor and stagnation of unfeeling 
selfishness, sleep over their reeking earth-centre the 
sluggard souls that rot in pampered ease ; and calm 
above them, reaching strong arms of helpful action out 
of that calm, rest the deep souls of victors over self, 



The Inward Peace. 93 

borne to their heavenly centre by the unfathomed, 
silent and vasty tide of inward life and power, setting 
on Godward, truthward, freedomward forever. The 
outward cry and dissonance of the evil, exaggerate its 
vital power, for it is outward, turbulent, and fierce by its 
very nature. 

The outward noise of opposition, the battle for the 
right, the spoken words of liberty for spiritual growth, 
the protest against wrong, and the stern summons for 
man's personal freedom and his soul's emancipation, are 
but faint measures of the under-working power, that 
wide, pervading leaven of central peace subsisting at 
the heart of endless agitation. Could we but see the 
broad far-reaching spirit of peaceful renovation, work- 
ing in silence now, our hopes would deepen and our 
terrors melt away. 

Could the Astronomer set up his magic tube in the 
white silence of the moon, and look back upon earth's 
stormy deeps, he would not find the turbulent Atlantic 
with its " still vexed Bermoothes," the fierce wave 
dashing to foam upon the jagged rocks, but, looking 
through the stormy brine, whose inequalities would be 
reduced by distance to a polished glass, he would see 
only the deep fixed bottom, with its fringes of many- 
colored light, where the bright gardens of the ocean 
bloom. So tranquil, trusting souls of the Redeemed 
look down, sheer through the tempest-riven surface, 
to the calm centre of essential life, the eternal beauty 
and eternal peace, nurtured below and slowly bringing 



94 The Inward Peace. 

all into its unruffled sphere. This air we breathe is not 
a "hollow air; " the very gale that wrings the tortured 
forest as with mortal pangs, has in it, in unfluttered 
calm, the power of the invisible millions who, led by love 
and fellowship, reveal the inward peace unjarred by out- 
ward storms, that still survives, still grows and spreads, 
and yet shall bring earth's noisy power under the 
banner of the Prince of Peace. 

Our hearts once tuned to the deep inward Soul, that 
under Nature rules its wildest uproar, and holds its 
silent court in the tumultuous whirl of passion and 
unrest, we shall so use this vast convolved world as 
the curious child his polished shell, finding it full of 
mysterious God-murmurs, full of intimations of immor- 
tal life ; and, listening to our low-voiced Monitor, we 
must 

" Adore and worship when we know it not, 
Pious beyond the intention of our thought, 
Devout above the meaning of our will." 



THE CONQUEROR AND 
THE SAVIOUR. 

FEBRUARY, 1857. 



THE 



CONQUEROR AND THE SAVIOUR. 



There rose up many centuries ago two Heroes on 
the Earth, in different lands and ages it may be, for 
both have vanished from the world they changed, 
where their works yet bear fruit, how very different 
these myriads of years ! 

The one was of large limbs and strong, with jutting 
brows bent down to his cavernous eye-pits, and black 
and shaggy locks, as with crisped anger curled over his 
low front and darkly glaring eyes. His lips were 
straight and blue, and tightened like a clasp across his 
teeth, through which his hot breath hissed like a ser- 
pent's hiss and blighted like a samiel. His hand, 
huge-boned and steel-strung, clenched a heavy weapon, 
upon whose edge was black blood, crusting dabbled 
hairs of infants and of women. 

But men had put a purple robe upon him, and golden 
chains with princely jewels decked, and crowned his 
head with wreathed flowers, with intertwisted threads 
of gold, and woven oak and bay lay scattered in his 
path ; while on his head, in battle's stormy hour, had 
crouched a mimic dragon for his brazen helm, where 



98 The Conqueror and the Saviour. 

the fierce claws seemed to clench into the knotted hairs, 
and a bright plume swept gracefully down, hiding by 
times the horrent gnashing of the brazen teeth. Wild 
tones of gratulation greeted him, and music rang her 
most sublime accords out from a thousand twisted 
throats of brass, in welcome of his coming. And yet his 
steel-shod feet were miry with blood of trampled hearts ; 
the flowers that strewed his path grew darker crimson 
from his dripping tread, and even the purple of his vic- 
tor robes hid not the deeper stain of human blood. Oh, 
it were hard to tell why men adored him, ay, or why 
endured him ; yet in the ages he became a God, and 
hecatombs were burned upon his altars. How marvel- 
lous that men should shout their praises round him in his 
evil life, and burn rich incense to his memory after 
death ; for what in all that monstrous character was ad- 
mirable that we might admire ? or lovely to attract the 
love of men ? or beautiful to delight us ? or yet what 
worth of goodly works and eminent godliness could de- 
mand our veneration and our gratitude? 

He came into a land of peace and toil, where the 
humble hearths were centres of household love and in- 
nocent delight ; where the spade and the hoe were glo- 
rious weapons in the hands of gallant-hearted workers, 
warring on want, and winning bloodless victory ; where 
laughing girls cheered the glad reapers in the yellow 
fields, and leaping babes shouted to welcome home the 
happy sire, and shed with many kisses the rippling cas- 
cades of their sunny hair over the hard brown faces 



The Conqueror and the Saviour. 99 

that grew glad and sun-bright with the greeting. He 
came ! as comes the red sirocco to the oasis ; as comes 
the livid pest upon the populous vales ; as comes the 
avalanche on the sleeping hamlets ! a horror of great 
darkness, with the noise of many waters. The golden 
fields grew black, and the white bones of the reapers 
mixed with the sodden ashes of their sheaves. The 
long hair of the virgins streamed across the blood-red 
thresholds of the burning cots ; and the heroic matrons; 
shielding in death their shrieking little ones, fell over 
them upon the simmering hearths where the old, thin 
blood of grandsires, who in vain beat back invasion with 
their shattering crutches, was bubbling in the last red 
embers ; love and delight gave place to horrible wrath ; 
the sickle and the hoe, the spade and plough and pru- 
ning-hook were tortured in the roaring forge to sword 
and spear and deadly battle-axe, as in that hotter forge, 
fire of the roused passions, the fine home virtues were 
transformed (infernalized, shall I say) to savage attri- 
butes. Hunger made thousands thin and pale, the warn- 
ing spectres of that awful night ; and thousands crept 
about on shattered limbs, crippled and maimed, and 
slashed with ghastly wounds, while thousands more left 
their blue corses to steam up in loathing clouds against 
the burning sun, avengers in their very dissolution. 

Away, like an infernal wave, swept the grim hero's 
train, hot, ruining, and strong, while the crowned mur- 
derer rode upon its burning crest unscathed by God's 
quick lightning or man's lightning wrath — feared, flat- 



ioo The Conqueror mid the Saviour. 

tered, and obeyed, and, after all, adored. Adored, 
though good men shuddered at his memory, and wives, 
with blanched cheek, heard his awful name, and very 
babes shook execrations at his effigy and trembled as 
they mocked him in their play. 

Such was the hero of destruction ; such the one 
whose genius only found its voice in ruin ! 

The other Hero was not born to win the admiration 
of the stormy passions. He came in poverty, without a 
name, without an arm of temporal power, nor haply 
with that charm of personal presence which may win 
some few admirers for the nucleus of his fame. They 
say he was not fair to look upon ; his visage, marred 
more than the faces of his toil-bent fellows, could kindle 
no delight in young-eyed fancy, no effeminate pity for 
his ill-cast lot. Yet there was something in that deep 
blue eye, full of unfathomable thought, as if its moveless 
gaze had seen in one far line of vision the infinite ago- 
nies of the human heart, its sin, and suffering, and de- 
spair, and the far splendors of its pang-bought heaven. 
Ah ! haply in that very youth of toil and want, he felt 
the burden of those atoning pangs come down upon his 
own high-hearted soul, high in its solitude of matchless 
character, high in its altitudes of woe, but higher, 
grander in the awful reach of its sublime hopes, that to 
common hearts had seemed more fearful than their pas- 
sionate despair. He bore no weapons to his commis- 
sioned work, though foes glared hatred on him without 
mercy. He called no throngs of eager followers to his 



The Conqueror and the Saviour. 101 

ranks, though frowning myriads darkened in his path. 
Yet he was armed with a divine sword against whose 
edge nor keen nor solid can avail, the sword of Truth, 
which is the Spirit of God ; and was surrounded by a 
glorious band of glimpse-seen angels, in whose wide 
wings' waving he drank the inspiration of supernal life, 
that gave him vigor and power even in the darkness of 
his unconscious moods, when doubt and human dread 
moved like dim spectres in the shadow of his cross ! 
For thirty years of lowly poverty and manly toil he did 
the work of his earthly father, and nursed this awful 
secret of his prophetic heart in that heart's utter soli- 
tude, till time should call him, ripe for the great work 
of his heavenly Father. Three decades to the earthly 
mission. Three years for all that after-work which vast 
eternity can never measure ! 

Ah, pitiful mourners over the briefness of our life, and 
the few moments that a soul can snatch from the wild 
whirl of bodily cares and pleasures, if bread and broad- 
cloth do demand your life-long service in the week-day 
world, one Sabbath hour of work-life's rest and soul's 
activity may win redemption for a fallen world. If earth 
have taken all but the last hour, mourn not because it is 
the last, and lose it in the mourning, but use it for 
eternity. Cast the long wandering heart, though palpi- 
tating with its latest throb, into the scale of God, against 
the huge world that has pressed it pomace-dry, and even 
yet the huge world may leap up, light as the dust that 
trembles in the air, and that pained heart sink victor 



102 The Conqueror and the Saviour. 

into death, whose setting here is sun-like rising in 
another world. 

Learn from the hero of regeneration that length of 
labor measures not its worth ; but the direction, ear- 
nestness, and wisdom of it, are its nobler test. He was 
a conqueror, but his victories were peace. He won 
opposing realms, but gave, not took, the price of tri- 
umph, which was their salvation. 

We have read the record of his wondrous works for 
now almost two thousand years, the hallowed book of 
books demanding something of the reverence the soul 
offers to its noblest hero. We find him great, ay, great- 
est, in that simple record, the nobler for its dignified 
simplicity. He healed the sick, and opened the blind 
eyes, made the deaf hear, and taught the dumb to speak, 
and cast out devils from the strangely afflicted ! But 
not for these, the physical expressions of his power, nor 
for the daring that could bid the waves " Be still ! " or 
walk their turbulent bosoms as on a rock, — not for such 
deeds we call him greatest and supreme in his trans- 
cendence of the earthly conqueror. 

The fabled demi-gods of an antique age were 
crowned and gorgeous with such deeds as these. 
To win new worship, he had need of an Ideal more 
divinely worthy. If he is now to human apprehension 
the noblest being that has borne the burden of human- 
ity, it is for deeds, and words, and inexpressible 
thoughts, beyond the utmost scope of any juggler's art 
to reproduce or feebly imitate ; it is for his one over- 



The Conqueror and the Saviour. 103 

mastering thought, that made his life a martyrdom for 
man ; it is that he could die that they might live ; that 
in the stained heart of the Magdalen he saw the 
sisterly white bond of union with his own sinless heart ; 
that his large charity forgot the sinner in the suffering 
woman, and mildly bade her cherish the womanly and 
sin no more. I see no Love so great, and deep and 
tender in all the past, and therefore call him Loveliest 
who so loved ! I find no Wisdom deeper, in its own in- 
stinctive thoughts, among the crowned kings of philoso- 
phy, and therefore call him Wisest. I see no Greatness 
for which the mighty of old were crowned great, that in 
humaneness of the heart and soul, still mindful of the 
body, can compare with his, and therefore call him 
Greatest. If any soul not yet enfranchised from its 
pupilage on earth, sees in the life and lessons of this 
moral Hero aught less than perfect, far be it from me to 
fasten on that soul a name, to hold it back from its 
divine life to a lower Ideal, and reverently I dare to say 
for my great Hero, far enough from him will be the 
thought that any record of his life on earth should be a 
bondage to the aspiring soul, a weight to hold back any 
noble heart to deeds less noble than its own pulses 
prompt him to, or thoughts less worthy than his own in- 
spirations teach. But let not him who is less pure, less 
wise, less noble in his human fellowships, less great in 
his divine aspirations, dare for one moment to accuse of 
imperfection, or condemn for faults in that behalf, the 
grand yet simple majesty of Jesus, the Ideal hitherto 



104 The Conqueror and the Saviour. 

of the great Hero of the loving heart, the unrivalled 
Wisest of the intuitive soul. Above all, let no follower, 
no adorer of that other hero, the blood-stained ruiner, 
shake his audacious tongue in chiding babble against 
the world's Redeemer, that heart of hearts, sad with 
the multitude of sorrows not his own ! 

The ancient Persian on his sun-lit hills, not yet in- 
spired with any clearer light that touched the inward 
nature of man and the divine, saw in the regal sun, so 
pure, life-giving, and imperishable, an answer to his as- 
pirations after God, and bowed before the unquenchable 
splendor with a reverence acceptable, to be sure, to the 
Creator of that measureless Glory. He who to finite 
eyes must ever lend an image infinitely less than perfect, 
will accept the highest offering of the earnest soul, and 
nothing less. As soon as in one shadow of a fault 
the great Ideal of the reverent soul fails of that whole- 
ness which the soul demands, it cannot stand for the fit 
image of the living God ; for while it cannot satisfy the 
loftiest intuitions of our nature, how less can it be hoped 
to represent the Almighty to perfection ? 

While we must see that the deep worship of the unil- 
luminated soul, its utmost reach of grasping aspiration, 
is not an unacceptable offering to the Inscrutable, though 
it rest vaguely on His glorious creation, we learn to re 
verence the reverence and love the love which true 
souls offer to their truest brother soul, to the great 
restorer of a sinful world, the clear-eyed prophet of a 
better age. 



The Conqueror and the Saviour. 105 

The apotheosis of the Prince of Peace, though it has 
come, came slowly and partially ; for only here and 
there, in select hearts, were the high virtues that could 
answer his, or the ripe deeds of that serene wholeness 
which is the best expression of his faith. True, in his 
life, as in the warrior's, men clothed him in a purple roy- 
alty, and crowned him amid acclamations of the mob. 
But it was done in bitter mockery, the wreathed thorns 
tearing his cloudless brow, and the deep purple of his 
kingly robes only foreshadowing the deeper purple of 
his martyr blood. Ah ! little thought the legions of the 
Roman, when they bent their victor lances to that deed 
of hell, that the scorned name they tossed from lip to 
lip in mocking cruelty, should haunt the ruins of the 
Eternal City like an avenging ghost, the watchword of 
their iron-hearted masters, a spiritual whip to lash the 
wolf-cubs of old Romulus to the tame cringing of obe- 
dient spaniels. 

Little they thought that the contemptuous purple 
would blaze forever through their subject city, the deep 
blush of everlasting shame ! 

Here, then, is tragic justice with the judgment thun- 
ders, and the ignominious rods with which the hangman 
lashed the shoulders of the Innocent. For now these 
many ages the name of the outraged Galilean Prophet, 
more outraged by that use than when he felt the Caesar's 
whip, has been the scourge of Roman slaves, from Ro- 
man heroes creeping down through twenty generations 
satiate with infamy. 



106 llie Conqueror and the Saviour. 

And here, too, is poetic justice, with its compensative 
gifts. The proudest nations of the world have been 
compelled to reverence that Name, which more than any 
other name on earth has grown to be a power among 
mankind ; and better than the reverence of the nations 
is that for which the nations have been forced to take 
the name of Christian, even in marring it, — that broad, 
deep hold upon the human heart which the great life of 
Jesus has acquired, the silent strength of love and reve- 
rence, widening and ever widening in its reach, an influ- 
ence beyond the external utterance, deeper than words, 
and mellowing even the savage service of that other 
worship in the hushed interludes of roaring war. 

It is a marvel to the generous soul how the two wor- 
ships, so opposed in word and spirit and spontaneous 
ritual, can subsist together in so entire possession of the 
mind. You look across the lands of Christendom, and 
far along from hill to hill, and from green vale to vale, 
the white spires and castellated towers of Christian tem- 
ples pierce the purple sky ; and, when the Sabbath 
dawns upon the weary world, ec ho to answering echo 
peals the deep reverberations of the bells, as if a thou- 
sand ranged sentinels along the front of some victorious 
camp, sent the swift signal from the farthest tent to the 
remotest banner in the lines : " Day comes, and all is 
well ! " The flocking multitudes that seem to issue one 
by one, or two by two, or in small groups, from the 
green majesty of wood and field, in holiday attire come 
pouring in to the ten thousand temples silent and reve- 



The Conqueror and the Saviour. 107 

rent, before the throbbing air has ceased to palpitate 
with the deep undulations of the bells. Ah ! tell me not 
a word can perish that is spoken in earnest ! 

It is not verily the intonations of the Sabbath bells 
that call the thronging multitudes together ; it is the 
deepening echo of a living voice that child-like prattled 
once in the high valley of Nazareth, and strengthening 
into manhood, shook Judea's hills with solemn prophecy. 
Such power is in a word that comes in earnest from 
a vital soul. Twenty centuries ago the scorned name 
of Jesus but brought a slight contemptuous curl on the 
proud lip of him who heard it. To-day that name, not 
that spirit, is master of the world, a power to rule the 
power that rules the empire of the nations ; or, for ano 
ther test of its prevailing influence, speak but a word in 
deprecation of his life or speech, utter one thought at 
variance with the interpretation of his thought, and the 
old scorn that greeted him greets you, with the same 
hatred interfused that drove the red spikes through his 
blessing palms, a test at once of the wide power that 
Name possesses, and of its co~ existence with the antago- 
nistic spirit of revenge. 

But if all Christendom seem Christian, and the very 
jealousy of the dear honor of their Christ betray not the 
deep presence of his enemy, the unkind spirit of destruc- 
tion, read it in words of fire, when not for Sabbath wor- 
ship the wild bells ring out war's alarms, and the rum- 
bling drum and shrieking fife and braying trumpet join 
their brazen clangor to rouse the nations to the mortal 



io8 The Conqueror and the Saviour. 

conflict. Where then survives the reverence of the 
" Prince of Peace ? " His very shrines are filled with 
war's sulphureous magazines ; his temples are the bar- 
racks of the soldiery. Men throng together in bright 
raiment, the sacrificial robes of the grim priests that 
offer human hecatombs to the cruel God of battles ! 
But where are the many-colored glories of the Sabbath 
throng of wives and little ones ? Alone at home the 
wives and little ones sit sorrowing in sackcloth and 
ashes, or fly to exile in swift-footed terror before the 
coming of the victorious foe ! One God, one Christ, 
one Faith unites the deadly combatants, and deep below 
all, high above all, permeating all, one savage likeness 
of revengeful service to the grim genius of destruction 
runs through all, — antagonistic similarity and dismem- 
bering unity of spirit, but both alike subversive of the 
nobler worship of the Redeemer. 

The anomaly is gross, but not quite unintelligible. 
We are all of manifold natures. Every man is germinal 
angel and fiend, with the fierce Nero and the mild Jesus 
undeveloped in him, till ruling circumstances shall sum- 
mon it out, now this, now that peculiar element, which 
in a long chain of unchanged events, of war or peace, 
commerce or husbandry, becomes the prominent pas- 
sion of the man, the reigning instinct of the multitude. 
Again, the master souls of every age and every thought 
are few. The million are but plastic clay in the strong 
hands that mould them. 

There are in every age the accredited priests of every 



The Conqueror and the Saviour. 109 

altar that the human heart has sanctified. Bellona's 
bloody fanes are served by crowned heroes great in 
evil things and masters of a mobile multitude. The 
temples of the meek Restorer are not forsaken of their 
natural priesthood when all the outward service has 
been desecrated to the dark purposes of revenge and 
blood. 

The martyr spirits of the age, great, god-like men 
and noble women, calm and full of courage, who dare 
die for truth, and render love for hate, are the anointed 
priests and vestals of the never-failing fires on the most 
holy altars of redeeming love. The unquenched spar 
kles of that fire in the dark bosoms of the shifting mil- 
lion, answer the breath of their brave lips with a re- 
newed glow that keeps them still alive under the driz- 
zling sleet of selfish hate and slaughter. When the 
strong natural priesthood of the Renovator are left pos- 
session of the common mind, with only the natural cares 
of earthly life for rivals to distract it, they draw the 
bonds of fellowship more close ; religion natural reigns 
in every hamlet, whether pointing with a church-spire 
to the clouds or not, and the faint sympathies of the 
estranged multitude grow stronger and stronger, till 
Christendom indeed seems Christian, and the reign of 
Love begun. But men have passions, and a germ of 
hardy heroism, not to be ruled out by far millenniums 
or forgotten in the schemes of universal comity. We 
may unlearn the lessons of revenge, but while a foe 
lasts to molest and harm, we cannot lose the indior- 



1 1 o The Conqueror and the Saviour. 

nant sense of wrong, and the quick instincts of sword- 
bearing justice to repel assailant outrage and invasive 
power. 

If then there is strong natural justice in the blow that 
vindicates imperilled rights and guards unweaponed vir- 
tue from a lawless hand, how easily may that stern spirit 
be degraded in hearts not wise, and strong in the divine 
attributes of being. The impressive millions, with 
their great blind instincts groping after light, and forced 
to follow where the strongest lead, are not like eagles 
soaring to the sun, but rather like those eagles swoop- 
ing on their prey. Till they are' wise in the precise use 
of that gift of valor, till they have learned not merely 
the high wisdom of forgiving love, but how and where 
the stern appeal to force may lend a lawful outlet to the 
heroic nature, the mobile multitude will never be the un- 
wavering champions of regeneration, the trusty guar- 
dians of the great cause of progression. 

The two religious elements now are in antagonism, 
but both have a deep basis in the natural soil. The 
profanation of instinctive justice becomes anger, and 
what was meant for a defence of virtue is turned to the 
dark purposes of tyranny. 

The peaceful element grows pusillanimous and whines 
of mercy when it should be preaching the impending 
judgments of Almighty God. Its ministers have turned 
their backs to the deep fact of retribution in the heart 
of the earth and in the visible purposes of God ; and 
thus have they divorced the service of the temple of 



The Conqueror and the Saviour. 1 1 1 

peace from the complemental service due as well at the 
high altars of supreme justice. 

Revenge is sin ; but to smite sternly, when a stern 
blow only can vindicate the cause of injured right, or 
rescue innocence from wrong, is not a sin, but is as 
clear a duty as our human love, and stands upon that 
broad love for its basis. 

Jesus the Lover is divine and great, and worthy of 
our loving reverence, Jesus, who bent in pity over the 
Magdalen, who bade the sinful woman sin no more, and 
wept for the lorn daughter of Jerusalem with pitiful, 
warm womanly tears ! 

I would to God we were all worthy that even the hem 
of our garments might be wet with the least of such 
holy, sympathizing tears. But that was not all the Man ; 
nay, if you will, that was not all the God. He had a 
voice for that low wail of pity, a hand to lift the outcast 
from the fall of shame ; but the same voice could give a 
solemn emphasis to the terrible " Woe unto ye, Scribes 
and Pharisees, Hypocrites ! " the same hand could wield 
the braided scourge against the unholy desecraters of 
His Father's house. 

There is a stern, strict justice that is not revenge, 
a sword of deliverance that is not wet with an unright- 
eous blood-shed, drawn but as the sacred knife of the 
high-priest, God, and sanctified by every holy aspiration 
and tempered by the very breath of love. Such is the 
hand that guards the inviolate household, and such the 
keen blow that finds the weak way to a despot's heart, 



1 1 2 The Conqueror and the Saviour. 

and wins new freedom to a groaning people, a blow not 
rashly struck, nor vainly put forth in the name of God to 
reap a harvest of enemies. 

Brothers of Christ, and Lovers of Humanity, leave 
not to the tuition of vindictive men, that broad, strong 
element of retribution which God's work here so needs 
and man so desecrates. Train it, and teach the multi- 
tudes how to hate worthily, as well as how to love ; 
to hate, not in the low sense of a cruel passion, but the 
deep moral abhorrence of all evil things, which is the in- 
stinct of a healthy nature ; to love, not with the mor- 
bid sentiment of sickly sympathy, but in the manly 
frankness of a noble heart, that shrinks not from the or- 
deal of suffering wherein to suffer nobly is to bless 
mankind. 

Harness the rugged energies of men to the great 
work of God, and rely not on the tender sentiments 
alone, nor leave those sterner traits to be appropriated 
by the enemy. If you aspire to wear the name of 
Christian, teach by your lives what Jesus was, the piti- 
ful lover of the poor and needy ; the generous helper of 
the down-trodden and outcast, and the unsparing wielder 
of the unshrinking scourge to high-born crime, unholy 
license, and sanctified oppression. 



HE A VEN 
IN ITS MUL TIPLICITY. 

JUNE, 1857. 



HEAVEN IN ITS MULTIPLICITY. 



" In my Father's house are many mansions." 

Every desire of the human heart has at some time 
found an expression under the controlling influence 
of the religious nature, even to the distorted and 
perverse passions, which are at vital enmity with true 
worship, and an enlightened faith. The constancy 
of this fact proves nothing to the benefit of the dis- 
tortions, but it does tend to prove that man's Here- 
after must be only a brighter reflex of his Here, and 
that his whole nature must find in heaven some fit 
abode for its entire capacities and wants. It will 
never do to dismember the many-fashioned soul to 
save it, nor dwarf down its gigantic proportions that 
it may enter in at some strait and narrow gate, 
however sacred in the eyes of many, however excel- 
lent in its one idea. Though God is found a unit in 
his infinite integrity, he is thousand-fold in his diver 
sal manifestations, and to finite mind must still appear 
under a thousand names which pass each for the 
whole, and claim the entire devotion of the human 
heart. 

With whatever force of bigot fury the narrow view 
is urged upon Mankind, with whatever willingness 



1 1 6 Heaven in its Multiplicity. 

mankind may seek to stifle all within the heart that 
contradicts the bigot's narrow faith, a stern and sav- 
ing necessity breaks down the close partitions, and 
new thoughts, new creeds, and broader vistas of the 
spiritual world appear, and million-chambered Heaven 
opens on every side for million-featured man ! God 
works his purpose over all our heads, and even 
when we seek blindly and rashly to set bounds and 
laws against his working and our freedom, the sud- 
den revolt of some recusant soul shakes the old bar- 
riers and breaks the prison bars and makes us richer 
while we rage or mourn. Even the dismembering of 
the one great family, the Babel of ancient history, 
which, sending men to the far corners of the earth, 
seemed so to punish their audacity, has had its glo- 
rious use in man's redemption. Compact masses are 
more easily enthralled than scattered tribes ; crum- 
bling citadels let in the air ; wide spaces lend more 
breadth for individual growth ; and the necessities of 
self-reliance beget the noblest elements of character, 
I am not disposed to mourn when the church walls 
of crowded sects give way, and air the multitudes 
again. The instinct which compels the bees to swarm, 
works in our working and dissolves our too close 
partnerships, and brings down the plethora of un- 
wieldy minions to a healthy mean, and plants new 
centres of thought and effort from the too crowded 
budding of the old. 

Heaven in all creeds is the ultimate reward of 



Heaven in its Multiplicity. 1 1 7 

excellence, in that kind most excellent to the parti- 
cular sect or faith. For this cause the ideal Heaven, 
the image of that supreme bliss to which the various 
souls aspire, becomes the exponent of those souls, an 
index of their individual character. The desert wan- 
derers from a famished land will set foremost of all 
in their pictures of the coming good time, the foun- 
tains and the vines, the green hills and the rivers of 
a land flowing with milk and honey. Perpetual hun- 
ger begets perpetual visions of plenty. The man 
who perishes in the bitter cold, sinks away at last in 
delightful dreams of glowing hearths and homes of 
comfort. Pained souls make heaven the absence of 
that pain they suffer, and the active sense of all those 
delights which it denies them. But crowned and 
satisfied souls only magnify and make immortal the 
happiness they enjoy, to express their notion of future 
blessedness. 

It is not to be expected then of any ordinary teacher 
and preacher of righteousness that he should hold up 
the image of a heaven accessible from every side. 
The Paradise of the Moslem must be approached 
over Al-Sirat, the bridge which seems like the edge 
of a drawn scimetar. The gates of Valhalla were 
opened only to the brave in war. The dim fields of 
Elysium could never be reached but by crossing the 
nine-fold river of hell ; and a strait gate shuts the 
entrance to the abode of Christian saints in their bea- 
titude. Small souls imagine that the future has no 



1 1 8 Heaven in its Multiplicity, 

room for more than they in its world of bliss ; and 
in this they express a truth which even they are not 
aware of, while they also utter the narrow sentiment 
of all ignoble and bigoted souls. The unconscious 
truth which they utter is at once the largest liberal- 
ism and the most thorough sectarianism ; the narrow 
way, the select circle, and few that be therein, indi- 
cate the great truth that the reverential soul is not 
gregarious, that heaven is not to be reached in cara 
vans like Meccan pilgrims, but by the solitary devo- 
tee, walking straitly by the path of his own incom- 
municable nature. Religion is purely personal, and 
cannot be social. No two bodies can occupy the self- 
same place, nor can two souls any more. My rela- 
tion to God is founded on precisely that which I am, 
and never can be confounded with yours, nor yours 
with mine. Did the exclusionist see this when he 
talked of the narrow road, he would be no more a 
bigot, but walk his solitary way, rejoicing that the 
vast myriads of moving souls were also going up by 
their own paths, alone to the steep heavens where all 
their rays of individual happiness converge to one 
intense focus of infinite delight. 

Hold in your minds this simple figure for a mo- 
ment longer, and you will find perhaps a clearer 
expression of the ascending spheres and circles than 
you may have been able to elaborate hitherto. Upon 
the plane of the earth there is a level from which 
all start together in the ascending march of progress. 



Heaven in its Multiplicity. 1 1 9 

Each in his own undeviating line of individuality 
moves steadily toward the zenith, infinitely distant, 
where absolute bliss in all kinds, is the perfect hea- 
ven, to which all ideals aim. Here they are millions 
who walk on the same plane, but with a million varie- 
ties of powers. The generations before were the 
same ; the coming generations will be likewise ; so 
that when these have gone up a little, converging, 
however minutely, towards the. apex of the infinite 
cone of being, their circles will be closer, and ever 
closer, as they ascend. The fleetest to advance will 
overtake the slower circles of the former generation, 
and the laggards will hang back in the lines of the 
next, as they set forth, so that the unequal progress 
of advancing souls will never leave a void. Consider 
each section of ascent as a sphere, or distinct hea- 
ven, and it will be ever peopled by souls from every 
portion of the globe and every period of time, but 
peopled by an ever-shifting population, constant only 
as a whole, changing unceasingly as to its parts. 
But as we ascend, the converging lines will approach, 
with an eternal tendency to unite ; individual natures 
will assimilate more and more in the higher spheres 
and selecter circles, and the paths of personal pro- 
gress will seem less solitary, as the contiguous aspi- 
rants go up in almost indistinguishable nearness, till 
it may be presumed that, far aloft in unimaginable 
heights of being, the circles become identical ; one 
God, one Faith, one He°ven unite the myriad strands 



120 Heaven in its Mitltiplicity. 

of the great chords of. life, where all the tones of its 
far radiant fibres, twanging with their individual dis- 
sonances, shall unite in one full burst of harmony, the 
spheric anthem of the heaven of heavens. With this 
image before you you comprehend at a glance, how 
circles of being may be permanent while their inhabi- 
tants are transitory ; how even Hell, the sphere of 
discordant development, may be an eternal fact, an 
everlasting abode, peopled forever by the wicked and 
unclean, and yet no soul remain there beyond a finite 
period, and all at length be gathered to the folds of 
the blessed. The same figure will illustrate too, how 
at every stage of the ascent the next above seems, to 
common eyes, the absolute centre and apex of all 
progress, the perfect heaven of all aspirations, and 
hence how honest bigotry may be the companion of 
elevated souls, even in the upper spheres. The un- 
learned see, every man for himself, the blue dome of 
the heavens centred directly over him, and the broad 
world bounded precisely by his own eye-sight. This 
sort of egotism is carried up into spiritual things, and 
lends to unwise, half-wise, and conceited souls the 
happy feeling of being the chief objects of divine com- 
placence, the very elect of heaven. 

But wise and liberal natures know that the verti- 
cal heavens vault as grandly over every other soul, 
and the broad world opens from as perfect a centre 
to another as to him, and the clearness of indivi- 
dual vision is the only measure of their several limits. 



Heaven in its Multiplicity 121 

Is your horizon larger than mine ? I shall know it, 
haply by your almost unconscious acknowledgment 
that yours includes mine, and only adds to its out- 
most span. But if you set all my circles out of the 
circumference of your sympathies, you must transport 
yourself to another stand-point, and so lose your 
right, with your lost power, to decide, or by ignor- 
ing all my world, confess that your vaunted horizon 
is but a meagre hand's breadth, your straitened hea- 
ven, the narrowest Mansion in my Father's House. 
With these views freshly before us we shall not be 
unprepared to meet the inquiry which the words we 
have quoted ' suggest : what mean these many man- 
sions of the celestial abode ? Are they literal spaces 
surrounded by walls and entered by doors with lock 
and bolt to guard against intrusion ? And shall we 
find the vasty cube of John no symbol, but a rigid 
fact? 

Among the many disappointments and surprises 
which even enlightened men must experience in com- 
ing from their earthly to their heavenly sphere, the 
unlearning of this, we fancy, will be the least to very 
few if to any of us. The old physical heavens and 
hells have melted away, with all their solid seeming 
bastions cloven through by the clear light of better 
truths. The dark fire-lashed and adamantine cliffs of 
hell, that hang so ponderous and palpable in old 
fancies dazed by terror, roll off their dissolving masses 
in a lurid mist, and show the not less stern realities 



122 Heaven in its Multiplicity. 

of spirit-hunger and the far wanderings of unhappy 
souls. But there, too, is revealed the upward path 
to light and life and glorious renovation, winding 
right up the difficult and laborious steeps to rock- 
walled and golden-paved heaven, no beds of soft 
voluptuous delight, no battle-field of everlasting war 
made grand by everlasting victory, but to the many- 
mansioned heaven of blessed souls, the spiritual cham- 
bers of our Father's House. If these divisions are 
not physical partitions, neither are they the grada- 
tions of intellectual growth. The lore of all antiquity 
concentrated upon a single mind, would give it no 
charter to a higher place in heaven than his, the 
simplest unlearned heart that ever breathed in limp- 
ing syntax or in wordless feeling, its natural love of 
God and God-descended man. One sphere or circle 
of the blessed may hold the unlettered savage stam- 
mering his broken truths from a kingly heart, and the 
man who could clothe his aspirations in a hundred 
tongues, harmonious in all. Pure intellect is indeed 
a divine gift when it comes to crown strong passions 
and itself is crowned by towering excellence of moral 
and religious growth. As the bright centre of a 
golden Triad it is worthy of all honor and reward ; 
but, standing alone, it is no star of heaven, it leads 
no wanderer to the happy port, beacons no rocks in 
the too perilous path of the life voyagers, but often 
only sheds disastrous twilight over all around it. 
Mere cumulative memory, stored with all possible in- 



Heaven in its Multiplicity. 123 

formation, earns no crown from the immortals, nor 
any regard from the angel wardens of the supernal 
gates. In our Father's house are many mansions, 
but none for the mere organic and vitalized encyclo- 
paedia of facts and fancies. 

Though at the peril of disturbing some minds in 
their cherished notion to the contrary, I add, that 
these partition walls are not even the solid seeming 
fabrics of opinions and faiths, which so thoroughly 
segregate humanity in its initial sphere. To believe 
is no virtue, to doubt no vice ; for where evidence 
is sufficient we cannot resist belief, and where it is 
insufficient we have no right to wrest our judgment 
and compel a verdiety/^Jhe doubter who sees not 
God, whether confused by warring creeds or saddened 
into blindness over a world of sin and misery, who 
yet in his very soul loves lofty goodness and lives 
the good he loves, moves in the radiant circle of 
goodness, an angel among angels, even in this life 
of doubt ; and when at last the new life opens on 
him, and its new influences and surroundings heal the 
feebleness of his bewildered vision, the dawn of the 
divine Idea will burst with an ineffable splendor and 
the untold throbbings of a new delight. VHeaven was 
not made to be the reward of an opinion however 
true, and its golden gates swing to the mystic for- 
U_ mula of no brotherhood of the faithful. 1- There is 
peace in believing, and so far belief is a door to 
heaven, but he who ever felt the rackings of doubt, 



124 Heaven in its Multiplicity. 

often more terrible than the pangs of death, will be 
my witness that the peace which is in believing comes 
not from the kind of belief, but from the fact of belief, 
from the very feeling of having fixed upon a solution 
to this vast life-mystery in which and of which we 
are, even though that solution were no better than a 
settled conviction that the mystery is insoluble. There 
is truly more or less peace in this experience, accord- 
ing as the conviction attained flatters more or less 
your self-love, and gratifies your desires ; but as 
compared with the torture of a goading uncertainty, 
a firm conviction that the worst fate imagined will 
come, gives a calm and substantial repose, however 
gloomy and cold, and makes true the language even 
to an extremity not intended when that concise truth 
was uttered. Then it is not, I repeat, this or that 
faith which assures us our peculiar place and stand- 
ing in the kingdom of the redeemed. It is not wis- 
dom and knowledge in their earthly sense, nor the 
old grim valor and downright strength of hand and 
brain which won the immortal mead poured spark- 
ling from the skulls of the vanquished to the lip of 
the victor. These are at best but uncertain indica- 
tions of what really determines in the case, of that 
deep centred element of essential character, which in 
despite of every name and form and accident of time 
and circumstance, and by a law inflexible as gravita- 
tion and eternal as God, gives every man his place 
in the hierarchy of the heavens, or yet, for his just 



Heaven in its Multiplicity. 125 

recompense, an unserving abode in the dark circles 
of degraded life, the hells of unharmonized souls. 
The many mansions of the future home of man are 
then the types of those endless shadings in the essen- 
tial characters of men, with no relation to their acci- 
dents of faith and formula, their social or civic stand- 
ing. 

So far as the several faiths and systems of belief 
are the direct outgrowth of the nature of the believer, 
that is so far as they are original faiths, and not 
borrowed and put on by the acquiescent soul like the 
prevailing fashion in the body's dress, they are true 
measures of the mind and heart, and proper indica- 
tions of the heavenly circle to which they belong. 
But among the millions of the earth are only a half- 
score, or a score of positive souls who create the 
full system of thought in which they reside. A Con- 
fucius, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Paul or Calvin, Swe- 
denborg, Shakespeare or Byron, each in his sphere 
and to various degrees of plenitude, may stand re- 
vealed in his word and work ; for it was the exponent 
of his character ; and because we take our systems 
from such men, we also make up our judgments from 
their words and setting faith for character, reward 
or punish accordingly, not remembering that, with 
the lesser million, faith is but the merest child of 
circumstance, and hence no just measure of what is 
essential and intrinsic. All conformists, who are not 
rediscoverers in their own right of the old continents 



126 Heaven in its Multiplicity. 

of truth, or seeming truth, stand apart from their pro- 
fessed faiths and are judged apart from them by what 
they are, not what they are apparelled in, by their 
own word, and no reverberation even of the manliest 
word of another. If the chances of life had been 
transposed in infancy, the masses of Christendom 
would now be Islam, and Islam Christian ; our Sab- 
baths would have been Fridays and our churches 
mosques, while the Turk and the Arab would sing 
the songs of the Nazarene, patiently bearing our taunt 
of " Infidel " for their faith's sake. For surely the 
man who receives things for no deeper reason than 
that they are the established order, must ever be 
orthodox in whatever part of the world he is born, 
a Fetish worshipper in the wilds of Congo, a Moham- 
medan in Arabia, a devotee to the grand Lama in 
Thibet, and the most conservative of respectable 
Christians in a land of Bibles and churches. The un- 
asking credulity that shuts its eyes, and opens its 
mouth must be expected to swallow whatever it is in 
the fashion of a people to bestow. A man may utter 
the forms of a legalized and established Faith, to the 
last lisp of the nine-and-thirty articles, and yet in his 
heart of hearts hold Mammon, or the vulgar Bacchus, 
dearer than any other divinity ; or supreme courage 
and firmness may be the most precious things in his 
estimation ; and while he utters the names of God or 
Christ, not without earnest reverence, he involuntarily 
invests the one with the attributes of War, wielding 



Heaven in its Multiplicity. 127 

vindictive thunder, the resounding blows of that 
strong Hammer whose image is the symbol cross, 
and clothes the other with the stern unchangeable 
rigors of Odin, whose wrath will not give way till his 
own son perish. The worship is genuine ; for what 
a man is not in his nature he cannot revere, and 
what he is in the loftiest plane of his being he cannot 
fail to worship. The old names or the new names, 
it matters not which ; in this age, in that gray fore 
gone age, in those interminable far off ages of ages, 
through all the history of the reverent soul, Humanity 
has been the worshipper of Ideas, openly or tacitly 
divided into numberless sects accordingly to the num- 
berless shades of human character, and doing honor 
to the same intrinsic elements and essences by what- 
ever name they were embodied to the popular appre- 
hension. Deified Justice, degraded by vulgar minds 
to deified revenge, is the same ever and everywhere, 
whether you name its image Jehovah, Siva, Allah, or 
Themis. The sublime apotheosis of Mercy is none 
the less divine and great for the multitude of names 
the ideal has borne in the ages ; old Indian Bacchus 
making wine from water ; Greek Anteros, the love 
divine ; joy-giving Osiris scattering benedictions ; life- 
restoring Esculapius healing and blessing ; Janus, the 
mediator between men and Gods ; or the yet purer 
expression of all these, Jesus, the incarnate Mercy. 
The sincere love of God is the same in every age, 
and still more perfect appears the identity when it 



128 Heaven in its Multiplicity 

selects the perennial element of Charity for its ideal 
and impersonation. - 

No man in the fullest light of all the ages can 
approximate nearer to the simple grandeur of the 
incomprehensible God than he who first bowed to the 
majesty of forgiving Love, self-sacrificing, toiling, dying 
for the good of a world, its brothers. If such a wor- 
shipper is rightly named a Christian, then the eldest 
ages had its Christians, though the Christ of more 
recent date had not lived, and the last ages shall not 
be without them, though they worship more the spirit 
and less the men who have lived this Saviour princi- 
ple. The culture of the remotest periods of time, if 
perhaps it might have failed in the fulness and per- 
fection of its thought, as compared with the later 
lessons of the soul, yet held the germ and spirit of 
the newest revelation, a faint utterance in some things 
now paramount, and a broad expression of ideas fallen 
into the background in these years ; but from the 
very nature of the case, what is true being founded 
in character and essential character with its many 
shades being the same in all ages, the same varieties, 
the same resemblances, the identical many creeds of 
many men, will be reproduced and will be clearly re- 
cognizable under the diverse disguises of circumstance. 
A child's ideal of perfect bliss will not be the ideal of 
a man in its form and name, but in its power and 
essence it will be the same, an unbounded supply of 
that which in his estimation is best. But the ideal of 



Heaven in its Multiplicity. 129 

the child to-day will differ in no essential particular from 

the clear yearnings of young Abel, or the stern and dark 

ambition of untutored Cain. So is it with peoples as 

with persons ; so with the human race as with its parts. 

The many-mansioned heaven of character was open in 

all its golden chambers from the first dawn of individual 

being, but with something like the progress of a single 

soul, the whole great family of man has gone through 

a changing and advancing experience, now peopling 

chiefly the simple nursery of the heavenly abode, anon 

the school-room, and by times the rude gymnasium, and 

at length the chapel with its solemn songs and 

cadenced ritual. 

The highest reach of the childlike imagination of 

young humanity in picturing its divine aspirations on 

historical canvas, was that simple poem of the garden 

of Eden, a heaven indeed, but a physical, earthly 

heaven ; visited by angels, but in ignorance of their 

abode ; haunted by the voice of the Lord God walking 

there, but despite its towering walls and bolted gate, 

admitting the wily fiend to ruin all ; a heaven of 

complete innocence, but of innocence without its shield ; 

a life of bliss but of bliss sustained only by ignorance. 

Man fell with the influx of wisdom, fell from that state 

of ignorant innocence, only to rise up stronger to a 

heaven of regeneration at last, after struggling forward 

through the many intermediate circles, some of which 

in their separate character might well seem from our 

nobler height as the dark hells of a degraded race. 
17 



130 Heaven in its Multiplicity. 

The heaven of our Norse forefathers, the Scandinavian 
Valhalla, was a stern ideal begotten in the victorious 
struggle of man with his adversaries, the proud high 
realm of souls conscious of power, and hearts bounding 
with valorous blood. Guarded as by gleaming swords, 
and obtained only by the daring in arms, it meant 
the apotheosis of Heroism, as the first heaven meant 
the apotheosis of Innocence ; for the type of the 
heaven and its God are one ; knowing either, we know 
the other, as well. The milder nations of the Orient, 
who basked in a glorious sunlight, among luxuriant 
growths of every beautiful thing that earth produces 
from her mellowest turf, finding that gorgeous wealth 
of nature sufficient for their drowsed and satisfied 
senses, gave to their heaven the glories of this earth, 
more mellow and more rich, it may be, and subject to 
no change of frost and sun, but with all variations 
constant within the limits of a calm sensuous delight. 
Their heaven was indeed sensual, but their senses were 
refined, and lulled to a warm voluptuous slumber. 
With many this slumber was not eternal ; the career of 
the soul ceased not, though for some nameless ill it 
must tread back again the long ascent from vital atoms 
to the vitalizing soul, to climb once more in the difficult 
journey to the starry spheres. Wearied with this 
eternal coil and recoil, the votaries of pure Wisdom, 
followers of Buddha, seemed to renounce their immor- 
tality to win repose. They sought a heaven that should 
be permanent, a total escape from chance and changing 



Heaven in its Multiplicity. 131 

circumstance, which, pictured in the language of its 
aspirants, might seem to be annihilation, for neither 
hope nor fear, love, hate, delight nor suffering could 
reach the perfect Buddhist in his everlasting sleep. In 
the old heaven-sphere of the Orientals was an exagge- 
rated earth-life with its unspiritual blisses and their 
fleetingness ; this seems no less an exaggeration of the 
heart's instinctive yearning after rest. When the tired 
soul saw on and on one drear interminable round 
of transmigration, climbing and falling to climb back 
again, ever to fall and climb to no fixed end, in such 
dim fashion grasping the thought of everlasting pro- 
gress towards an everlastingly unattained and unat- 
tainable good, it wearied of the hollow circuit, and 
to escape from pain renounced delight, to fly from 
retrogression took drear refuge in unprogression, to 
escape the perils of vital consciousness and endless 
life's pitiful waking, chose death, with the hope of an 
eternal and undreaming sleep. But even here the 
graduated dooms of all beliefs entered as portion of 
the creed. This blessed-be-nothing felicity was only 
for the elect few while the great million struggled on 
in the shifting chances of eternal consciousness. We 
may smile at the strange inversion that substitutes 
heaven for hell and annihilation for active beingr but 
we must remember with gentle pity that life must have 
grown very heavy or very dull and hollow when one 
should choose death, and we will not forget that this 
contrast in the fate of the elect or non-elect only 



132 Heaven in its Mtiltiplicity. 

expressed in faulty symbols the two great truths of 
everlasting progress and its everlasting repose. 

Singular as it may seem to all who look to the Bible 
as the foundation of all religious knowledge, in the 
entire range of the Hebrew Scriptures we have no 
intimation of any heaven, no insight to any of the 
many mansions of our Father's House. If the Jewish 
bards and prophets and lawgivers talked of angels, it 
was of beings who came and went as men, eating and 
drinking and sleeping and wearing, with no hint that 
they came from a supernal abode. If they spoke of 
the heavens, they meant the literal vault, with its stars 
and clouds and thunders. If they talked of hell, it 
was not with the Greek idea of Hades, an abode of 
conscious souls, but the dark grave in which was no 
shadow of device or knowledge or cunning. While 
the hated Pagan had multiform and many beautiful 
pictures, and truthful as well, of the future condition 
and surroundings of the soul, it was not even a settled 
faith with the Jews, if there were any future life, though 
one sect among them had adopted the heathen doctrine 
of immortality, so singularly omitted, or vaguely sug- 
gested, in their own sacred books. But Christianity 
comes to us as the heir of all the past, Pagan and 
Jewish, and being rich with the varied wealth of all 
creeds, may well claim more reverence and faith than 
any one of her legators. Her heaven is not the Eden 
of innocence, but the new Paradise of regeneration ; it 
is not the battle-field of everlasting war, but the peace- 



Heaven in its Multiplicity. 133 

ful abode of triumphant warriors marching in from the 
dusty and struggling ranks of the Church Militant to 
claim their crowns, 

" Where the broad ensign of Messiah waves, 
By angels borne aloft, His sign in heaven." 

Its symbol on earth is not Rest alone, but rest from 
labor, and activity in worship. It sanctifies belief and 
rewards it above. This with many other exclusions, 
marks the Christian heaven, not as the universal other 
sphere, but only as one chamber in the many 7 man- 
sioned House of God. Faith is the grand key to its 
narrow gates, a strict, unreasoning and implicit reliance 
upon the reported and established creed, without which, 
so says the Christian, no man can enter the kingdom 
of heaven, but with which the worst of men can enter 
directly though into full felicity if his last breath is but 
a sigh of penitence for a life crowded with crime. To 
doubt where all is dark, to deny where all is contra- 
diction, to fail of right conclusions where reason is 
forbidden to enter, are crimes of the most fatal conse- 
quences, visited with eternal torment, not for the good 
of the tormented but for the glory of the Tormentor ! 
But to change the conditions, believe in the supreme 
excellence of another, let his righteousness stand for 
yours, and your own righteousness or unrighteousness 
profits nothing, discredits nothing ; your reward is an 
eternal Sabbath, where never-ceasing religious services 
are sounding in your ears, are resounding from your 



134 Heaven in its Multiplicity. 

tongues ; where every faculty is dumb, which goes not 
to the direct purpose of worship, formal, technical 
worship. This is the one idea of the Christian heaven, 
whose gate is Belief of the Record as written and 
voted canonical, and where life is only direct, everlast- 
ing worship. Noble it is, a high, sublime conception, 
but it is not all ; better, to be sure, than old helpless 
innocence, or the strong conflict of exultant warriors ; 
better than the eternal rise and fall of unprogressive 
transmutations, or the deep death slumber of all-pas- 
sionless repose ; yet it is but a very narrow heaven 
whose gate is too strait and" lowly for the broad 
full-hearted and full-statured manhood of this age or of 
any age to enter. Something of true and noble must 
be dwarfed and stifled, something of sweet benevolence 
must be expunged, to fit over full-filled natures for that 
narrow transit ; for which great fault in the record the 
modern church is taking in, more and more, the broad 
humanitarian thoughts of other creeds deemed worldly 
and Pagan heretofore, and almost unconsciously 
preaching the immortality of the whole nature in a 
nobler and more spiritual mode of existence. The 
beautiful affections of the soul for all that is beautiful 
in outward nature ; the jubilation of the ideal mind, 
dancing and laughing and clapping hands in immeas- 
urable glee in the all-jubilant dance of rain and shine, 
of leaf and rolling grass and waters and starry worlds ; 
the yet more beautiful affections of the great warm 
heart melting in blushes of virginal love, melting in 



Heaven in its Multiplicity. 135 

tears of pitiful chanty, leaping in full glowing billows of 
nuptial delight, of filial delight, of sisterly, brotherly, 
motherly gladness, and fatherly strength, of unquench- 
able tenderness and love ; the eternal search for the 
eternal more and more of knowledge, in the heart of 
the earth and the worlds, in the herb and the rock, in 
the waves of air and the -waves of light, in the long deep 
waves of the sea and the quick palpitations of subtle 
electric fire-waves ; the search for knowledge of Man 
and God and what deeper and larger mysteries of 
nature the eternal tide of things may have involved ; 
all these and numberless more than these, which go to 
the making of an entire and perfect fulness of the 
human being, belong to the great fabric of the future 
Heaven, as to the present heaven on earth, even as the 
profanation and defilement of all these belong to the 
far graduated hells of the future, and the life that is. 
No ; it is not ignorant innocence, nor deep wisdom, 
nor impetuous valor, nor the intermittent ebb and flow 
of transmigration, nor the deep rest of passionless and 
dreamless sleep, nor even faith in this or that report of 
things, nor worship, that makes the partition walls of 
the heavenly mansions, their gates of access, and the 
blessedness of the enfranchised soul in heaven. Again 
I say it is Character, vital central character, as it stands 
in the eyes of ever-ascending souls, as it stands in the 
eyes of the elder Angels incarnate in other worlds 
before this earth-world bore its infant man ; yes, naked 
character, as it stands in the eyes of God, undisguised 



136 Heaven in its Mtdtiplicity. 

by circumstances of time and place, of form and ex- 
pression. 

So far as the various ideals, systems, creeds, and 
heavens of the nations, express the inward image of 
the individual natures of men, they indicate true 
heavenly centres and circles, the real divisions in the 
unbroken series of ascending grades in a heaven of 
endless breadth, where goodness of every degree and 
of every name may find an ample field. God has 
bestowed upon us this many-handed soul to grasp and 
hold the myriad delights of beings, one power that 
feeds on beauty and recreates that beauty in a nobler 
form, one that can seize upon grandeur without terror 
and bring the mountains and the mountainous billows, 
the deeps of air and the deeps of thought, into commu- 
nion with the souls of men, a power to love and feed 
on all affections, to learn and fathom all mysterious 
deeps, to work and fashion all the mind can fancy, to 
bless and find a new untold delight in doing good, to 
frame high songs and to sing the worlds with our 
melodious thoughts, to know God ever in nobler wise 
and worship him ever in nobler forms along the golden 
cycles of Eternity. There is no faculty, nor power, nor 
cunning, nor device in the subtle brain, that is not part 
and portion of our immortality, nor that has not a right 
function and field assigned to it in the great hereafter. 
All will be refined and exalted at last, nothing gross, 
nothing lost, nothing that may not be the master in- 
fluence of some special circle, the sphere of many souls 



Heaven in its Multiplicity. 137 

yet immature and partially developed. It is by being 
more and more that we ascend to the diviner mansions 
of the blest, never by stifling, never by cramping and 
dwarfing our large womanhood or manhood, but by 
eternal nurture of all we are and all that unknown 
somewhat which we yet may be. It is only thus that 
we may come to the fulness of the stature of the Sons 
of God ; thus with a world embracing wholeness of 
soul we may stretch out and overtop the narrow sphere 
of separate virtues and powers in one broad heaven 
of multiplied delights, and so at once in some sense 
possess the many mansions of our Father's house by 
being the replete image of humanity. 
18 



SPIRITUAL CULTURE 

June, 1858. 



SPIRITUAL CULTURE. 



"And the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden to 
dress it, and keep it." 

Man, placed by an unseen power in a world of dis- 
cord and sorrow, himself a creature of jarring - passions 
and disordered will, yet has within him a yearning for 
a purer state, a reaching upward from the ills that 
surround him and are in him to a perfection which is 
prophesied to him by that very yearning. Dimly he 
gropes for that glorious consummation, sometimes feel- 
ing that its germ is folded warmly within him, some- 
times half conscious that it lies in the clenched palm 
of an omnipotent Benefactor to be wrung thence by 
propitiatory sacrifices and adulation. But to the crude 
first notions of the simple man it seemed a fading recol- 
lection, a dim far dream of something which had been, 
from which the stumbling soul had lapsed, in an evil 
hour, and into which it might climb again by the abne- 
gation of all those passions and impulses that seemed 
to be his bane and the clog of his aspiring nature. 
Then spake the Poet, prophet of that simple age, when 
to feel was to see, and to see was more than to believe, 
and gave form to the eager yearning of Humanity. 
Perhaps there did verily stir within him the divine 



142 Spiritual Culture. 

remembrance of the All-Soul out of which his individ- 
ual soul rose like a bright exhalation from a shoreless 
sea, and the last pulses of the long wave-like heart- 
beat it ascended on still fluttered in its shadowy folds, 
and gave the first keen quivering of individual life 
directly from its mighty undulations ; perhaps he saw, 
in a faint re-apparition, the happy innocence of his 
infantile life, when, clad in a form that long since passed 
away, the young soul walked and talked with God, and 
angels were his familiar friends, and from the blissful 
nescience of that untried state he shaped the ideal 
picture of what should be a glorious prophecy disguised 
as history. 

The Golden Age, the Paradise of Eden, the fruitful 
Garden of the Hesperides, the bright Atlantis of Pla- 
tonic dreams, are but the dim far reflex of man's golden 
future, the faint beams of the glory that we yearn for, 
flung back upon the canvas of the past. Hence the 
dark picture of the awakening which ends every such 
dream, because it is not realized. The glory which we 
have not reached, seems to have been lost, and man 
the unfinished, slowly emerging from chaos, appears 
no other than man the fallen, wandering far from the 
Eden of his birth. 

But it matters not to our purpose whether the Golden 
Age, the paradise of these beautiful fables, be taken as 
a veritable historic painting, or prophecy in masquer- 
ade ; its truth and significance are not impaired by 
either view ; it still stands a measure of our spiritual 



Spiritual Culture. 143 

wants, as type of our inward desire, and hence a true 
foretoken of the great beauty and truth and beatitude 
in store for our aspiring Humanity. 

The language by which the soul translates her wants 
and apprehensions to the senses, is a vivid eidograph, 
or magic-writing, by which outward objects stand visibly 
for inward facts. This makes the expressions of higher 
truths so constantly figurative. Our Prophets do not 
so often receive verbal messages, as living pictures 
from the high realm of the immortals. Beautiful forms 
of spirit-man and spirit-flower and glorious landscapes, 
with indescribable grand forests and majestic rivers 
clearer than crystal, and woven through, as with swift 
shuttles, by the bright fishes, golden, silvery and rain- 
bow dyed, and overhung by splendors of deep foliage, 
and alive with birds that chant melodious thoughts 
and vibrate the dinned air with blissful feelings : these 
and a thousand more of ineffable images^ burn, glitter 
and flash before the entranced vision of the happy Seer. 
It is for her or him to read into words the living show, 
and translate heaven's pantomime into earth's verbal 
language. The Poet's mission is the same. Poet 
and Prophet are one ; both are but Seers, shaping as 
best they can their various perceptions of the ethereal 
imagery they see. Though soul may take purely 
from soul the very essence of thought and feeling 
above and beyond the vain intervention of words, it 
is not so when soul translates through sense, and 
" r ould reach another soul by the avenues of eye, ear, 



144 Spiritual Culture. 

and mental understanding. Then Truth puts on the 
beautiful vesture of fable, and divine allegory walks 
forth in common day, leading the mystic daughters 
of dream to interpret by silent show the unspeak- 
able things of the soul. This makes poems of Bibles, 
and gives them an expansive meaning precisely com- 
mensurate with the greatness of the soul that reads 
them. In a certain veritable sense every man makes 
the book he reads, and more especially is it so with 
books that transcend common experience, and touch 
the deeps of the unutterable. The farther a thing is 
removed from the palpable and measurable, the more 
difficult it is to give clear form to its utterance, and 
expressive symbols for its illustration. Hence in con- 
stantly diversified images, whose interpretations are 
subject to an endless variety of meaning, the prophets 
of man's diviner future have given expression to their 
manifold perceptions of it, all essentially the same, a 
great vague Better, and everlasting better and better, 
but as various in details as the minds that uttered 
them. We look then on the Eden of Genesis as one 
fair form of the eternal dream, one mystic utterance 
of the deathless longing for that bright better which 
all love, haply by some heart disappointed of it here, 
flung back upon the past, that no unfulfilled hereafter 
may disturb it, a sad heart's prophecy all quivering 
with the agony of its Paradise Lost, though it could 
not lose the hope of final restoration, nor the bright, 
simple, glorious image of the Eden still to come, in spite 



Spiritual Culture. 145 

of the despondency which saw it as past. In that 
picture of vast extremes of light and shadow, where 
life lifts up its everlasting sunrise in contrast with the 
mountainous blackness of despair and loss, the artist 
has but set his back to the ever-rising sun, and painted 
darkly in his own shadow. In the glory that broke 
round and over that black human shadow, we see 
the halo of the coming Christ, Redeemer, Renovator, 
Saviour, the very newness of good to which we aspire 
forever, and aspiring strive to attain. Nor is the 
precise method of attainment quite lost sight of, either 
in the light or in the darkness, in the Paradise with- 
out its serpent, or in the Lost Paradise with its dim 
light, streaming down the black shadow of the man, 
crossed by a faint gleam of human hope, to a twilight 
symbol of the Better Man who should stand glorious 
in some future majesty. 

In that bright picture all seasons wait on Adam as 
their sinless Lord ; all creatures do him reverence. 
The earth, with no harsh thorns nor stinging nettles, 
pours all bountres at his feet. The infinite harmonies 
of nature peal one rhythmic anthem to her earthly 
highest, her human king, and to the Absolute Highest, 
King of her king and God over all forever. Nothing 
that eye or lip or music-hungering ear could ask to 
satiate their most delicate desire, was wanting in that 
lovely dream-world. And yet observe the latent irre- 
pressible truth that Heaven is purchased, and all high 
gifts have their price to make them worthy ; the Adam 



146 Spiritual Culture. 

was not put there for an idle life, as if he might enjoy 
without a task ; he was put there to dress the garden, 
put there because, in all its perfection of wealth and 
beauty, and spontaneous growth, there was not found a 
man to till the earth. I tell you dreamers, thinkers, 
yearners after Eden, if that man who produced this 
Genesis, thought he had shaped a bliss without a price, 
a heaven without a task, a good that was not made 
good by the working of the recipient, God slipped in 
the grand fact over his foolish head, and taught all 
idlers and hopers for an idle Paradise, that culture is the 
necessity of a growth which so much as leans toward 
perfection ; that work is the price of all attainment ; 
bliss is in doing, as palpably as in having, not at all in 
having without doing ; in short, that not Truth only, 
but every thing else desirable ''lies in the bottom of 
the well," and the well is deep and not dry. But the 
Prophet knew whereof he spoke. It was by no accident, 
no contravening interposition of Providence, that this 
great vital truth was woven into the glorious myth, and 
work became a part of the essential bliss of Paradise, 
a precious portion of man's purest dream of luxury and 
repose. Herein the farthest age has handed down in 
transparent symbols the intimation of the lesson we are 
called to review this day, the necessity of spirit culture, 
of work to make our Eden beautiful and its beauty yet 
more perfect, to make it fruitful and its fruit a tenfold 
bounty to a world hungering and thirsting for the good 
they dimly understand, and -still more, to make its germs 



Spiritual Culture. 147 

perennial, ever rich in light and warmth of temperate 
lives, alike removed from passion's scorching sun and 
the dead winter of self-hugging apathy. 

Neither in the light nor in the darkness, we say, did 
the dreamers of that inverted dream lose sight of the 
path to the highest attainment. How the light shone 
in the light, a heavenly ray of glory, we have seen ; 
how it shone disguised in the glare of a divine anger, a 
lurid light across the darkness yet softened into mellow 
promise at last, we shall now see, and make our use 
of the fable. When the ignorance and innocence of 
the child-age had passed away forever, in the light of 
a larger knowledge and the necessities of a larger 
growth, man saw that he was naked, poor and des- 
titute, that his good lay verily before him to be earned 
by dint of toil, and his feeling of bitter disappoint- 
ment turned that toil to a curse, and gave a malignant 
glare to the light of God's promise, Cursed is the 
ground for thy sake ; in the sweat of thy face shalt 
thou eat bread; but even then he told the evil genius 
of man's destiny, The child of the woman shall bruise 
thy head. 

Thus the perfect Man, the ideal of all prophetic fore- 
sight, was to be gained through pangs and sorrow ; 
the earth, cursed now with thorns and thistles, should 
be subdued only by the sweat of the toiler, and thus 
yield its fruit to the hand of labor. Precisely the old 
Eden life under aggravations ; the labor which in the 
first picture was necessary to complete the delight of a 



148 Spiritual Culture. 

garden of repose, was in the second darkened into a 
curse, but still tended to the same end at last, a victory 
over want, a reasserted lordship over rebel nature. So 
vital is Truth, that even Fable by a direct effort cannot 
escape its subtle essence. It would not be hard for 
Science, with her stone hammer, to demolish any lin- 
gering likeness to historical fact in this myth, for the 
coal measures of the geologist have manifold specimens 
of our noxious weeds preserved in the leaves of that 
grand herbarium ; and, withal, the thistles and thorns 
are as useful in their way as corn and potatoes. The 
dark half of the myth takes things as the author found 
them ; the brighter portion pictures them as the author 
desired them ; and in both the great lesson of culture 
is taught, the necessity of work to perfect the natural 
stock and fruitage of this growing, teeming world. 
Even in Paradise is an over-luxuriance to be shorn 
away, a mingled wealth of beauties and bounties to be 
separated and apportioned to their several beds, tender 
shoots to be guarded from too much sun and dew, or 
to be led out to the warmer kiss of the fostering life- 
father, wandering tendrils with no form to cling to, 
waiting the delicate touch of their lover to teach them 
to twine aright, and a myriad individual wants and 
prayers demanding an individual care and culture, 
beyond the broad providence of universal law. This 
made a necessity in nature of an Adam, with his two- 
fold developed nature of man and woman, to till the. 
ground and dress and keep the happy garden. These 



Spiritual Culture. 149 

wants too made the bliss of the Adam more complete ; 
and the whole fine paramyth is interfused by the radiant 
truth that though God worketh his infinite purpose 
through infinite laws, he still works to definite finite 
ends through finite entities, quickening divine growth 
through human culture. 

The breadth of this law and method in the divine 
economy is such as to render the personal application 
of the lesson to our race and ourselves absolute and 
imperative. Everything lacks something of self-com- 
pletion. Tree and vine and flower are not entire, but 
need dressing and pruning to bring out their best de- 
velopment of fruit and beauty, and spiritual aroma. 
All things are related, dependently if not generically, 
1 and have need that one should help another, no less 
for the perfection of the recipient, than for that of the 
X giver. One star in the heavens demands the guiding 
influence of another star, although far away, to lead him 
round his everlasting vortex, into which, but for that 
invisible brotherly arm of gravitation, he would be 
hurled to inevitable ruin. Here the favor is returned, 
and in kind ; both go in an ordered harmony, chant- 
ing their portion of the mighty psalm pealed by crea- 
tion to creation's God. The Bee has a tacit covenant 
with the blossoms by which she marries their separate 
sexes, and takes her fee in limpid honey and superflu- 
ous gold of freighted pollen dust. Not only have 
things a vital need of one another but of man the mas- 
ter, man the Messiah of Nature, who redeems low lives 



150 Spiritual Culture. 

to nobler use, wild waste to beauty, and things all excel- 
lent to a more perfect excellence. For how many thou- 
sand years a little bitter root festered and sweltered in 
its own poison under the glebe of this wild continent, 
waiting, pining, for its master, man, to wring out by his 
magic touch the capabilities of its unwholesome and 
unpromising growth before the Adam came to dress 
this Eden, and the cloven sod rolled out its mealy 
tubers, large and delicious, to feed a hundred million 
hungry mouths. So from American soil was almost 
created by culture what a strange Hibernian calls 
" Irish potatoes," whose history suggests the caution 
that even culture may be carried to excess, when it 
strains the appliances of healthy nature. For solitary 
ages a coarse grass waved on the pampas of Asia, and 
hissed sharply in the autumn blast that swept down 
from "the mountains of the Gods," the howling Cauca- 
sus, and scattered there its shrivelled seeds to the 
chance harvesting of bird and insect, and the perpetu- 
ation of its worthless race. Worthless ! who knows 
what is in the untried life of man or weed ? King 
Adam, Earth's farmer monarch, touched that hissing 
grass with his miraculous hand, put its sharp seed to 
school under the culture of his gnashing harrow, and 
now look over the wide world ; it waves on a thousand 
glorious plains, a sea of wheat whose foodful billows roll 
farther than the eye can follow, and still beat wave-like 
in the living heart of millions upon millions who would 
wellnigh perish from this earth should that fair plant 



Spiritual Culture. 151 

shrink back again but for a twelvemonth to the shriv- 
elled thing it was. . A crude, harsh, bitter excrescence 
has been cultivated to the delicious peach, and man's 
ameliorating hand has soothed the angry acid of the wild, 
to the mild juicy richness of the cultivated orange, the 
fruit of gold. Weeds that have made the wilderness a 
tangled waste of poisoned luxuriance, adorn and glorify 
our gardens, crown our full boards with bounty, and 
stand as holy symbols of divinest thoughts and feelings 
in all our hallowed places. Here and there in the wild 
growth of nature may bloom flowers, and ripen fruits, 
perfect in their own cultureless simplicity, yet by their 
rareness they are confirmations of the necessity of 
culture, while they stand as beautiful models to suggest 
high types of ideal loveliness to the swart priest of 
Pomona and the fair votaress of lily-cinctured Flora. 
But even these required the care of Adam to dress their 
fertile garden, to free them from the too close clinging 
of ungenial growths, and prune their over-exuberance. 

No Eden can dispose of its human lord, though 
there be heard the frequent voice of its Lord God 
walking there every cool evening, and the warm glow 
of his invisible presence be felt there in the lifeful 
slumber of noon. The perfect garden has its man in 
twofold wholeness of Adam and Eve. The rose is not 
quite a rose, the lily not a perfect lily, without the blush 
of that glowing cheek, the pure white of that nurturing 
hand, and some more delicate aroma of sweetness from 
the deep heart of their Queen. The tall pomegranate 



152 Spiritual Culture. 

stands up statelier for the calm pride of its Monarch, 
and takes a ruddier stain in its cloven fruit from his 
health-dyed cheeks. The reciprocity between man and 
nature is broad if not complete, and Earth, who gives 
him many good gifts, takes again more than she gives, 
that she may give him more, making his culture an 
eternal gain. Such are the analogies by which the 
external world teaches the use and worth of culture, 
the necessity of a governing mind to do for the indi- 
vidual what the great All-father does for the races in 
their entirety. The universal law has no partiality, 
though a thousand and ten thousand germs run to 
failure, and there shall be but here and there some one 
to grow and perfect its kind ; if each individual had 
a separate providence, then each individual m l ight be 
translated to its sufficient field and led up to its utmost 
development. 

In the Eden of the human soul there is room enough 
for all its beauties, all its fruits, its healing leaves and 
renovating juices ; room enough for the Eternal growth 
of every faculty, the full expression, in life, word, and 
work of every thought, high hope, and heroic aspira- 
tion. Souls need not jostle with souls nor crowd to 
suffocation in the field of their pasture. There is an 
infinite expanse for their infinite expansion. So with 
the several powers and faculties of the whole inner 
man ; one need not choke another ; large brain should 
not preclude large heart; fine genius in one channel 
need not displace high talent in another; nor the best 



Spiritual Culture. 153 

gift borne to its loftiest development take any pith or 
aliment from the full culture of any other gift. The 
earthly symbol is of necessity limited because it is 
drawn from sensuous objects. But our true Eden- 
world is without walls. No brazen gates bar in per- 
petual progress from a free outgrowth every way. No 
fiery sworded cherubim stands to prevent the erring 
soul from returning to its central Eden of harmony and 
repose, save that this may be read on the lively image 
of the great truth, that our march is onward and not 
backward, that a false step, like the false type in your 
lightning telegraph, is not corrected by a return, but by 
setting the true mark next foremost, and so on to per- 
fection. Nothing forbids the right and privilege of 
renewing life, but all revelations from God who is the 
infinite Restorer, as infinite Creator, declare our duty to 
write well the Alpha before we begin the Beta. It is 
precisely this and this only, that we are set to do, to 
improve not to create, to take crude matter and mellow 
it into beauty and life, to shape the rude outlines of 
our uncarved granite, or marble as may be, into a glo- 
rious image of the presiding God, who gave us the 
power to work, the place and the material. 

Our souls have nothing in their natal endowments 
that cannot be polished and perfected to a nobler, 
purer, better development by our own volitions. God 
worketh in us both to will and to do His holy pleasure. 
We have in our social constitutions, what the green tree 

and fair flower wanted, a personal providence to assist 
20 



154 Spiritual Culture. 

our development. It is through us, through all finite 
lives, that God becomes a special and particular provi- 
dence to work out special and particular ends, as con- 
cerns individuals otherwise not provided for under the 
everlasting, immutable law, or that portion of His prov- 
idence which we recognize as universal, impassive and 
cold. To speak strictly there is no difference, human 
love drawing soul to fellow-soul and heart to answering 
heart, inasmuch from an immutable law of God as the 
gravitation of the star worlds. The love of truth and 
beauty, working effectively through human hand and lip 
and the silent eloquence of life, "is God's work by a law 
of His high being, as fixed and vital, as positive and 
eternal, as the law by which He shapes the lily and 
unfolds the sun. Our human reason is God's revela- 
tion, written out in clear or ambiguous language, as it 
gives purely or darkly the significance of God's other 
record and the works of His omnipotent hand. The 
in-breathing, the inspiration of the Almighty gives us 
understanding ; God is perfecting us when we perfect 
ourselves, loving us when we love, cheering us when 
we gladden another, teaching us by pain and suffering 
when we err through hate, ill purposes, or ignorance. 
If we do well He works with us, and the harmony of 
the coincident motions gives the high sense of delight 
and holy rest which comes with well-doing. If we do 
ill He works over us, compelling our work to His ends, 
and the jar of the transgressive action gives that bitter 
sense of unrest, the pain, remorse and shame, which are 



Spiritual Culture. . 155 

the several prices of our several errors and crimes. It 
is then, not that the work of creation is suspended by 
the Creator, and we are instated as finishers and 
adorners of the world, but through us, using our hands 
and tongues, our thinking minds and busy souls, God 
works and so multiplies the delight by a countless 
reflection of His happy consciousness. It is His 
because we have no creative, originating faculty, and 
yet have surely and visibly a formal origin, and 
conscious relation to our higher cause. It is ours 
because it has pleased Him who is in all to give us 
individuality and a fixed, everlasting, separate self, 
fenced in by a definite consciousness that has survived 
the many times total disintegration of our organic form. 
No amount of growth, no amount of bodily waste, 
impairs or touches the central consciousness of self, 
and no ingenuity of the dream-power can imagine the 
loss of it. It does not depend on memory, for no man 
remembers the road he has come from infancy to age, 
and often in disease one forgets who he is, but never 
that he is somebody, distinctly an absolute self. No 
one has ever traced any tendency of his entity to merge 
with the universal, and be lost, whatever his half-blind 
philosophy might have been. We are, not by virtue of 
this visible organism, but above it, even when working 
in it, as God is above all, working in all. Our field then 
is inalienable ; none can take it from us, and no eternity 
of activity can overfill it. We have here the amplest 
scope for our tillage, with the highest promise of losmg 



156 Spiritual Culture. 

no whit of our right culture. Over this immortal 
Eden Reason and the Moral Sense are enthroned 
as Adam and Eve, the one endowed with absolute 
truth, potentially if not possessively, the other with 
love to shape and train and vivify the productions 
of our fruitful natures. Truth or mental symmetry- 
is the companion of beauty or symmetry of form, 
which in spiritual things is moral beauty, goodness, 
holiness. 

Let this Adam strike straight and deep the furrow 
of first principles, break down the obstacles, the doubts 
and errors which impede the growth of harmony, plant 
the quick germs of perfection, and shape a career for 
their luxurious growing. Let this Eve breathe gentler 
strength into the bud, guide the young tendrils to their 
firm support, and make their rich vinery a bower of 
love, a beautiful veil of the indwelling beauty. In a 
word, to translate the figure, our culture must be a 
wholeness of the action of our double natures ; reason 
and affection, truth and beauty, rigid right and mellow 
charity, keen- eyed analysis and modest reverence must 
work together in large unity, each tempering the sepa- 
rate pulses of the other, and both together forming a 
harmony that may be a genuine, though faint expression 
of the great rhythms of universal harmony, in the out- 
working of the fatherly strength and motherly love in 
the twin heart of God. 

Man is radically the same in all lands and ages. He 
may be the offspring of one Adam or a hundred ; he is 




Spiritual Culture. 157 

the offspring of one God, and though he sprang up like 
the mushroom on every damp islet, and solitary nook and 
corner of the wide earth, his generic unity is stamped 
deep in every feature of his outward form, every motion 
of his inward mind, every aspiration of his innermost 
soul. Culture alone, direct and transmitted, has made 
the vast disparity between the extremes of the human 
race. There is not an Ethiop under the hot perpendic- 
ular sun, and over the hot sands, who is not a possible 
Newton, a possible Plato, a possible Jesus. Behold 
vast shoals of these unascended ghosts drifting wildly 
on the desert blast, a dark dim cloud, with lurid light- 
ning of intermittent wrath rolled over their abysmal 
sphere, like smoke that boils, now red, now black, 
voluminous and terrible, like fabled Hell. Little by 
little out of the indistinguishable mass, form after form, 
touched by some softer light from above, the love light 
of a pure brotherhood and sisterhood, rises up slowly 
into growing symmetry, ever more softening in the ra- 
diant glow, till all the dark is interfused with light, and 
anon becomes self-luminous, a growing glory in the 
brightening life ! 

The great souls who have walked this earth in the 
majesty of an attained angelhood, walked with the 
accumulated culture of a thousand years, the gathered 
wealth of all their ancestral nurture folded in their 
childhood. If, here and there, a large full-statured 
soul rises above his age and generation with no great 
'past at his back, no magnificent present on either hand, 



158 Spiritual Culture. 

and only the sublime future incarnated there, the antici- 
pation of a thousand years of culture, at once a prophet 
and a prophecy, his perfectness does not deny the law 
of progression ; it is not above culture into yet higher 
and larger development. He is but one of those excep- 
tional natures who are types and models of our possi- 
ble, and for such purely ideal greatness, Nature, lav- 
ish of her care and bounty towards races, at age-long 
intervals throws into one crowning work the best of 
her scattered goods, and makes it the master-type and 
suggestive model for all poorer ages. These are the 
Messiahs and Saviours of their kind in this, that they 
teach the capacities of the race, and show how common 
faculties hold latent their infinite perfectibility. Their 
existence is a spur, and not a clog to culture, when 
Humanity uses them, not for servile imitations, but as 
grand suggestions to high aims, the invulnerable demon- 
strations of its lofty destiny, proved possible henceforth 
and forever. 

It may be deplorable but it is scarcely to be wondered 
at, that men should make these great lives the rallying 
point of their institutions for human culture, or that 
their culture should readily lapse into a cultus, a wor- 
ship, or religion in honor of these good monitors. They 
are in some sort worthy of our worship, and while we 
remember that best worship is in best action, we shall 
not be liable to loss for some ages yet in giving great 
reverence to the great archetypal men. When a higher 
attainment has given clear form to higher conceptions it 



Spiritual Culture. 159 

will be time enough for these devotees to unniche the 
lesser gods before their worship degenerates into hol- 
low idolatry. Then, indeed, to live in the old ritual, 
to seek life in the old defunct institutions, would be to 
ignore the living God, and the ever-present manifesta- 
tions of his power. If Heaven, by invisible means, 
endow a hero, prophet, priest or moral monarch of this 
world, it is from no partiality to that man, who, seeming 
to overleap all intermediate steps, vaults from his dim 
present into the advancement of a remote future ; for 
while he has his crown possessively, he has not that 
zest in possession which comes from the sense of con- 
quered want, and the keen delight of progress and 
visible achievement. When progress is eternal, it is 
but a trifle to be set forward a thousand years or wait 
a thousand years to begin your career. Eternity will 
make such distances the nearest points, like spaces be- 
tween far stars, that, vast as they seem from one to the 
other, are lost in the infinite distance from which we see 
them. Our life measures its delights by pulses of the 
advancing growth, not by place and possession. A man 
put -forward without the unfolding of his nature from 
within, simply loses all between the last point of his 
achievement and the height he is thrust upon, and by 
losing this, loses the best relish of his higher position. 
Placed in the very heaven of our religious believers 
who confound place with condition, an undeveloped man 
could find no higher pleasure than he left, with the pain- 
ful consciousness of being out of his sphere. He could 



160 Spiritual Culture. 

not experience its exquisite delights till moral culture 
had schooled him to its degree of attainment, by creat- 
ing the real heaven within him. We have no power to 
add one pulse of beatific life to any being beyond its 
development. So far the waves of its own heaving tide 
must break, or it falls back to a long fatal ebb, from its 
unnatural stress, and leaves the freighted bark of its 
hopes and pleasures stranded far up the barren shore. 
Heaven is for such as have grown to it, not by miracu- 
lous gift, free grace or prayers of any, but by assiduous 
self-culture, and the long and often painful discipline of 
events. The man put into a sphere of bliss beyond his 
development, can have no participation in its delights, 
nor a conception of them, more than the child of six 
years could participate in the feats of strength at Olym- 
pia, or in the tender care and hope of paternal interest. 
Start where you will, it is the forward march that gives 
the joy of life, and life once harmonized, brought into 
true relations with other lives, and with the life of all, 
is full from that day forth, and would not miss one 
throb of its expanding heart for an archangel's crown. 
The archangel himself must toil up and still up, or die 
of inaction back to his lowest level. Had he been 
created an archangel he would have no more conscious 
happiness than the least life that has risen above the 
circle of discord, for there would be no intermediate 
pains and struggles, and landmarks of victory to stand 
on, measures of his altitude. These are the cloudy 
backgrounds that make the sunshine a tenfold glory ; 



Spiritual Culture. 161 

these the nights that make new day-dawn a recreation 
of the jubilant world. 

In our true Eden eternal Action walks hand in hand 
with eternal Rest, unending Struggle opens the golden 
gate of unending Victory, everlasting Culture, glad 
nurse of many blisses, crowns all our Paradise of life 
with everlasting newness of fruition. Once come into 
the realm of harmony, where the whole nature has fit cul- 
ture and harmonious development, our work is play, a 
joyous art, a free upbuilding of exuberant life. Adam, 
in his thornless Eden, finds a proud joy in being co- 
worker with the universal Culturist. The degraded, 
fallen Adam, man in the discordant spheres of unequal 
development, must still remember his task, and toil to 
where toil is no pain. Through sore travail the man 
shall be born into that realm, but into it he shall come, 
and still come. Not in or by one man, shall this ser- 
pent's head be bruised but in eternal avatars of ever- 
recurring newness, as age by age unfolds our measure- 
less wants to God's immeasurable bounty. Right work 
in fields of true activity, will win the lost Eden for 
every man, making the wasted heart and desert mind to 
blossom with rare flowers of usefulness and beauty, and 
all the shrivelled wilderness of life grow beautiful and 
rich with fruitful deeds of good, glad thoughts and holiest 
affections. How shall we cultivate our souls, hearts, 
minds, the Eden of our lives ? Shall we adopt the cur- 
rent institutions, the School, the Church, the rituals, the 
hallowed Sabbaths, and the anointed Priesthood, work 



1 62 Spiritual Culture. 

in old channels or create new ones ? Accept everything 
that feeds the soul with the sustaining bread of life, 
church, school, or synagogue, or heretic conventicle. 
If in baptism is any washing out of old stains that you 
still see darkening the white vesture of your souls 
while you neglect the ordinance, in God's name plunge 
into the sacred font, and take along with you the sapo- 
naceous virtues of true penitence to make the bath of 
cleansing efficacy. But do not insist on dragging in the 
scrupulous, who see no virtue in bodily applications for 
direct spiritual purposes. If wheaten bread and fer- 
mented wine stand for some * positive virtue in your 
mind, as true and necessary symbols of the living 
waters of truth and sacramental life-bread, eat and drink 
in the name of the Highest, and forget not the wells of 
living inspiration, and the true life they are to symbolize. 
But ask not him who sits at the very fountain of spirit- 
ual truth, and finds the trees of his own Eden full of 
the actual bread-fruit of divine life, to leave his sub- 
stance for your shadow ; he too has his everlasting 
sacrament, and the angels sit at his table in holy com- 
munion. If Sunday is a holy day to you, keep it holily. 
Monday is holy to another, and Tuesday has divine 
hours with a third ; the day of Woden is sacred to a 
fourth, and the old thunder-god has his rites on Thurs- 
day. No true Mussulman will dare profane Friday ; 
and the peeled people of God, the scattered jews, cling 
to their holy Sabbath, Saturday, with the tenacity of 
life. Accept them all ; the whole seven-chorded lyre of 



Spiritual Culture. 163 

the seven nations is alone adequate to peal the anthem 
of our true work-worship to the all-embracing Father. 
There is no ritual which a true man can accept, which a 
true man cannot serve God under. Shall we have a 
ministry ? Yes, a ministry of ever-opening truth. There 
is no faith which can flourish without its priesthood. 
When a man speaks God's truth he is anointed as 
God's priest. If the old ministers preach falsely, and 
renounce the truth, no amount of holy oil, or holy 
water, or white hands piled in stacks on their heads in 
solemn imposition can give a shadow of divine authority 
to their functions or make their blindness a safe guide to 
the half blind. If we find the old ministries preaching 
the living truth, in living words, then we are not called 
to desert them. 

But let us beware of the whole leaven of deception. 
We who have learned a clear deep truth, that underlies 
all spiritual Culture, are not to cling to the fetters of old 
bondage from any weak spirit of concession, or idle 
carelessness, or the soft flattery of easy acquiescence. 
If adherence to the truth you have found in the divine 
openings of God's word to your soul costs you a pang, 
it is a token that you need to adhere to it, and come up 
to the nobler height, where truth is peace, and the toil 
of culture sweetens the repose of attainment. The 
truth-seeker is a man, a woman, a child ; and has a 
social nature like every other man, woman, and child. 
But this is not given for a snare, and we who have had 
the bitter and painful task of unlearning the drilled, 



164 Spiritual Culture, 

dark lessons of our childhood, we who with death-and- 
life struggle put down for ourselves the monstrous 
Incubus that theology had throned on the high places 
of the universe, and quenched with our bloody sweat 
and bitter tears the volumed fire-waves of his fa- 
bled Hell, should be cautious how we suffer the inno- 
cence of childhood to be scorched and withered in 
the breath and darkness of the same monstrous ter- 
rors. Parents, simply for lack of other social gatherings 
for childhood, send their children to the old Sabbath- 
school, to be set up in silent rows, and put to the 
question on matters they have no curiosity to fathom, 
and which if they cannot absolutely understand, it is so 
much the better for them, to be taught to fear God, while 
their young hearts are tenderest to love, to see ever 
before their trembling, tottling steps an interminable 
gulf of fire into which they may stumble at any mo- 
ment, when instead there are truly the white arms of 
angels to uphold them and to guide them gently when 
they wander. One can walk straightly on the level 
ground and rarely stumble, but set him over a gulf of 
horrors, will he be likely to keep better step ? Even if 
this terrible lesson were true, it would be most egre- 
giously mistimed. Scold the tough old transgressor. 
Scald him with your fire-bath till you get him tender, if 
you must use it ; but let childhood be fed on simpler 
loaves, simpler truths, clear, natural and healthy. Let 
the children have the birds and the flowers, the bab- 
bling brooks and the waving grass for lessons. Let a 



Spirihtal Culture. 165 

great wise loving nature take these little ones by the 
hand, and answer their own curious questions, as they 
walk among the daisy fields, and hear the bees hum in 
the scented clover. Let the gentle, the affectionate, 
and the simple-hearted gather them in the quiet room 
and hear their stories and put forth to them parables 
and myths, and join them in their songs, teaching great 
moral truths without name, creed or sect. Then as 
their minds grow large and free, open first the easier 
mysteries of life, and step by step lead them on pleas- 
antly from many lives to the one Life that bubbles up in 
all, from several loves to the great Love that warms and 
glows in all, from the bright show of things to the 
invisible Soul of things, from nature simple, free and 
growing, to the kind God who loves with Mother-love 
and watches with Father-care, and through the large 
heart of each good child of God, blesses the little chil- 
dren. 

For ourselves, let us take deeper lessons in the same 
school and spirit. Let us do what good thing our hearts 
see waiting to be done. Speak high truths nobly, seek 
them bravely, cling to them enduringly, strangle every 
base thought at its birth, nail every meanness to the 
ignominious wood, and nurture every germ of nobleness 
till it spreads oak-like its storm-defying strength and 
makes the nations silent in its shade. Let us twine the 
young tendrils of all white-budded loves around all 
lovely things, guard as the holy of holies the sanctity 
of intimate companionship, the one love constant to the 



1 66 Spiritual Culture. 

one centre of many lesser loves, that our hearts may 
ripen well the fruity clusters clinging there, blushing 
full of the rich mantling wine that makes glad the life. 
Let us nurture all stately virtues like lofty cedars on the 
mountains of Lebanon, all fluent graces like the pen- 
dent willows of the brook, all odorous kindnesses like 
the lily of the valley and the rose of Sharon. Let us 
be the new Adam and the new Eve above the charm of 
the tempter, and dress the garden of our Eden lives, 
and so live as to keep it verily, and hear not seldom the 
voice of the Lord God walking there in the very midst 
of the garden, while the perpetual murmur of angels' 
wings shall make the renewing earth as heaven. 



FAITH AND LIFE. 



jftme, 1858. 



FAITH AND LIFE 



" The just shall live by his faith." 

Divines have shaken earth and beclouded the heav- 
ens in a war of words, to establish the rival claims of 
faith and works in the great scheme of salvation. The 
orthodox child of Calvin and the Catechism asserts, with 
a volley of texts from the Bible, that the just shall live 
by his faith alone ; belief and not works is the highest 
title to divine acceptance here, and the only road to 
heaven hereafter. And not even belief in a large 
sense, that great spirit of faith that sees God in every 
law and work of his infinite universe, and thus teaches 
that true work is right worship, but a definite belief 
in the historical decrees of a little sect in Judea, 
a belief that precludes the necessity of practical good- 
ness by assuming that our work has already been done 
by the son of a carpenter in a town of Galilee, a 
brave, true man indeed, who laid judgment to the line 
and righteousness to the plummet, and from the cross 
of persecuting hate hewed out his ladder to the heavens. 

You may sin with a high hand, so you do it with a 
long face and under protest of your self-accusing cant, 
if you will only trample on every honest doubt of 



22 



170 Faith and Life. 

the old miracles and marvels, great or contemptible 
alike, and with an equal zeal tread down the demon- 
strations of the last miracles and marvels, often as 
great, and never more contemptible. Nay, more ; not 
only you may sin, but you must, to have and to give 
that assurance of being a Christian which is acceptable 
to your fellowship and the record which says : 

" There is none that doeth good, no not one." 

" There is none good but God." 

" For I know that in me, that is in my flesh, there 
is no good thing." 

" I delight in the law of God, after the inward man, 
but I see another law in my members warring against 
the law of my mind, bringing me into captivity to the 
law of sin which is in my members." 

If, then, the chiefest of apostles must be the chiefest 
of sinners, how can any common Christian hope for 
salvation, while unhaunted by the workings of remorse, 
or the low hiss of lurking self-contempt ? Con- 
scious purity becomes the merest self-righteousness, 
and the believer is prompted to be more ashamed 
of his virtues than of his vices. Hence the pitiful 
cant of confession and self-accusation among men, 
whose hypocrisy, though habitual, becomes conscious 
when you coolly take them at their word, and quietly 
intimate that you have long felt the truth of what they 
assert. Resentment shows her dagger then under the 
torn toga of Humility, and your very sinful, pious 
neighbor for once need not simulate a vice for the 



Faith and Life. 171 

purpose of avoiding the suspicion of over-righteousness. 
On the other hand the man of correct morals, and a 
sturdy disciple of good works, puts all his reliance on 
the excellence of his performance, and makes the ques- 
tion of faith a nullity. Believe or not believe : there 
is no efficacy in that ; do the good thing and think 
the wrong one, if you will ; — your doing and not your 
thinking is your ticket into the celestial courts. 

Now it happens in all earnest controversies and 
declarations of opinions, that which is put forth on 
the affirmative of each system or creed, is at bottom 
true, and we have only to shear off the excrescent 
negations and denials of other faiths to make all creeds 
parts of one symmetrical work, a well-joined ark of the 
covenant, or glorious mercy-seat, with shadowing wings 
of angels over it. 

When the man of good works and doer of the word 
asserts their saving power he does well, and all his 
great heart and expanding soul testify of the divine 
truth which he declares ; but when he strains the sig- 
nificance of his experience to make it sustain a denial 
of the necessity of faith he does ill, and betrays an 
utter ignorance of the springs of all genuine actions 
in this world. The believer, by narrowing the defini- 
tion of faith to a mere acceptance of certain documents 
and their reported marvels, has no doubt misled the 
minds of many who, with a substantial and deep faith 
at heart, have taken the position of denial rather than 
seem to sustain so palpable and shallow an absurdity. 



172 Faith and Life. 

But when a sect of any kind, Pagan or Christian, 
deniers or mystics, take universal language and de- 
grade it to a particular narrow, and therefore false, 
application, it becomes the duty of the philosopher to 
snatch it back to its broad uses, and utter so the great 
plenary creed of universal truth. At one moment the 
sceptics will claim him as their champion and echo 
his expansive utterance with a narrow meaning against 
the narrow believer, for there is a bigotry of unbelief 
as rigid and contracted as any baptized bigotry. At 
another moment the disciples of this faith or that in 
the clashing creeds of Christendom will lay their un- 
gloved hands on his great words, and turn them for 
swords against their enemies ; and find perhaps at 
last the keen weapon was all edge, with never a hilt 
for the little hand that would grasp it for petty uses. 
And yet again his very catholicity will often bring down 
the whole hornet-swarm and wasp-swarm and hives 
of angry bees, with unity of mutual wrath and venomed 
stings, to punish him for his charity, for enemies are 
not always content that you speak well of themselves 
if you spice your speech with no curses on their ad- 
versaries. 

Between this wedded couple, Faith and Works, 
there should be nursed no quarrel ; divines and phi- 
losophers should have better business than to disturb 
the marital harmonies of a union made verily in heaven 
for the joy of the whole earth. " What God hath 
joined together let no man put asunder." 



Faith and Life. 173 

To rescue a good word from too partial uses, and 
suggest considerations tending to a fuller harmony 
between the alienated lovers, Faith and Works, let 
us look more sharply into what we understand by 
Faith, and so trace the necessary, positive, unavoidable 
connection between this spiritual condition and the out- 
ward life of practical efficiency. 

First, negatively, let us see what it is not, by way 
of clearing off the waste and rubbish from about it, 
to show more clearly what it is. It is not to believe 
that this sublime system of things, the stellar orbs 
stretching their arms with fire-pulses that throb out 
thirty thousand years into space, as they embrace far 
worlds and myriad ages, and this torn, scorched and 
quivering globe, with its lithographed chronicles of 
countless millenniums of time, have existed but six thou- 
sand years, and were then called from utter nothing by a 
Power that had kept a blank eternity without a pulsa- 
tion of any activity. It is not to believe that such a 
Power can be identical with the ever-present, ever- 
active, infinite pulses of life in all things, which we 
see around us, or that, having put forth one pulsation 
of formative power, it could tire and rest and be re- 
freshed. No ; from the knowledge that everything 
is working under vital conditions, whose constancy is 
written in the starry copy of the midnight in letters 
of fire, and set on the foundations of the world in 
enduring stone, Faith, as from a granite peak, leaps 
like Jove's Eagle to the throne of the Highest, and 



174 Faith and Life. 

asserts with the voice of an earthquake, that God is, 
and is an eternal Creator, and works as the lightning 
in an element as eternal as himself, and inseparable 
from his Being. Life and the thing alive, creator 
and the thing created, must have a co-existence. If 
God was no Creator till six thousand years ago, he 
has dropped some hitherto everlasting attribute, and 
taken up a new one ; which would cast a shadow of 
instability over the most positive of all existences, 
and leave Faith no certainty from which to lean out 
after the unseen. 

Faith, then, is not the implied assent, in spite of un- 
satisfied reason, to this or that report of this or any 
being. It is not to set foot on the neck of reason, 
nor compel doubts to withdraw their questions of 
order unanswered. It does not disdain evidence, nor 
reject the aid of logic, but with instinct and seemingly 
blind law, it welcomes logic as a helper. It intrenches 
itself in law ; it stands upon evidence, or the clear proof 
of that which is visibly so to become an evidence, of 
the unseen and yet as absolute reality. With a true 
perception, Paul defines faith as the substance of 
things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. It 
has its foundation in the instincts of the human soul, 
and not seldom when the sceptic brain has darkened 
all the avenues of trust and the definite outgrowth of 
those instincts, and the specific faith lies dead in the 
very temple of the heart, these fine monitors do the 
work of faith, and make men wiser with a deeper 



Faith and Life. 175 

wisdom than they know. Faith is the completion of 
the circle of Truth from an arc of demonstration, the 
carrying forward to legitimate conclusions in the human 
mind of the visible intentions of nature, which are 
thoughts of God's thinking, and furnish premises that 
reason may follow, but not exhaustively define their 
significance. Where reason fails and can only suggest 
a tendency rather than a demonstration, Faith holds 
the severed clue, and looks steadily forward to the 
point indicated by that tendency, and only yields the 
guiding thread to the successful hand of positive evi- 
dence after belief has become demonstration. It works 
suggestively. It points the untrodden path to the 
Leverrier up through the trackless spaces beyond the 
burning planets and dim asteroids, to where chill Nep- 
tune, distant and alone, unwinds the slow coil of his 
ages. But Work, stern, rigid, and persistent, walked 
step by step along the impalpable air with Faith, and 
bridged by linked and riveted sequence of mathematical 
demonstration the attenuate gulf of ether crossed by 
one arrowy flight of Faith. It was Faith, with the 
staff of rigid proof in her hand, who stood by Newton 
in his memorable orchard and gave him power to cleave 
through the depths of space in pursuance of the ever- 
lasting law by which his apple fell, and by which the 
sabaoth of stars forever falling, falling, through abys- 
mal spaces, yet never fallen, wheel their immeasurable 
circuits round the throne of God. Though winged 
like an eagle she can only fly by having firm footing to 



176 Faith and Life. 

leap from, a world of reality, and an atmosphere of 
living fact to buoy her up. 

That is no faith but an idle and vain superstition that 
can set foot on a thin fog-bank of hypothesis and 
strike out for an easy flight through vacuity, only to 
bring back phantoms and lying vanities. Shallow 
Credulity who believes without a wherefore, and sows 
her sterile soul with a faith that grows to no conse- 
quence, as the wild-goose sows the ice-crags with tropi- 
cal seeds, this bird is just so giddy of purpose, and 
light of feather that she can strike a very bee-line 
through a vacuum, and sail with level wing where Mil- 
ton's Devil fell : 

" Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour 
Down had been falling, had not by ill chance, 
The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud, 
Instinct with fire and nitre, hurried him 
As many miles aloft." 

But poor wind-tossed Credulity has no need of that 
nitrous fire-burst of chaotic vapors to carry her through 
the thinnest voids, in search of the most collapsed in- 
anities. When schoolmen hang the salvation of the 
soul on the kinks of a Greek iota, and stake eternal 
interest upon the accidents of a Hebrew vowel-point, 
unknown to the Hebrews who wrote the Bible, we may 
well believe that there is no air too thin for that credul- 
ity to feed upon, no vacuity too rare for its dilated bulk 
to float in. True Faith in her farthest flight never ex- 
hausts the impulse taken at her first leap, taken from 



Faith and Life. 177 

solid ground ; when that fails it is time she came back 
to find new bearings, touching earth like Antaeus to be 
made strong again, while perfect Credulity, wrestling 
with the Hercules Doubt in thin mid-air, discarding the 
aid of earthly reason, is strangled in the first stern 
grapple of her adversary. That faith which rejects 
reason for its substantial basis is simply unreasonable, 
though the strong instinct of belief in wealthy souls 
may carry the flight of faith beyond the power of 
analysis, and make men, as we may repeat, wiser than 
they know. 

The Prophet of old said, " The just shall live by his 
faith." Yes ; and in a larger sense, not the just only, 
but every man shall live by his faith, for all work by 
which alone life of any kind can be maintained, moral, 
spiritual, or physical, must draw from faith its vital soul, 
the electric aroma which gives nerve to the outward 
frame, and vigor to the conquering will. Man lives by 
faith, even in his natural life, by an actual, constant, and 
steady reliance on an unseen bounty, a reliance which 
survives the doubts of a bewildered reason, the denials 
of an overweening pride of intellect, and even the au- 
dacious scofhngs of an unsanctified heart, that takes 
God's perfect gift with a flaunting, flinging mockery at 
the name of God. The very mendicant, whether he 
knows it or not, is inwardly sustained by his own faith, 
when he relies on his neighbor's charity. The kicks 
and curses that he occasionally gets instead of bread, 
would teach him to despair of human charity if there 
23 



178 Faith and Life. 

were not in him a sort of instinct which tells him of 
an over-soul, above the individual human soul, which 
gives to humanity a charity toward even the undeserv- 
ing, for which no merely human goodness could be 
trusted. All our generosity points to a higher than our 
visible paternity, and begets in recipient minds a confi- 
dence in good, which, under whatever name it acts, and 
whatever name it assumes, is a true confidence in God. 

The incomprehensible All-good will not hold it 
against us as sin, that we have not clearly seen what 
the highest archangel cannot see, the fulness of his 
being in every ray of his revealed attributes. He who 
loves pure Love, loves God, for God is Love. He who 
is enamoured of Truth is a worshipper of God, for He 
is Truth. He who in verity bows before or loves any 
attribute of the infinite Perfection, in so far loves God, 
though the blinded and bewildered reason may have 
hung a cloud about the very name of God. Faith is 
deeper than logical formulas, and when robbed of its 
natural stand-point falls back upon the ineradicable in- 
stincts of life, the unanalyzed first principles of exist- 
ence. The Farmer who puts his plough into the frosty 
earth while as yet the north wind howls, and the white 
wings of the snow-spirit wave by times over his field, 
may not be aware that his sure confidence in the con- 
stancy of Nature is but a pagan disguise for a true 
faith in God, but so it is. 

If he is a clear-brained thinker, according to the scope 
of his genius, as the farmer is apt to be, he will not 



Faith and Life, 179 

walk blindly over the evidences of an all-watchful Love ; 
but while his hand takes hold of the hand of Nature in a 
mutual labor, his soul will reach forth a hand to the hand 
of God, and walk with his Maker, the new Adam in the 
garden of the Lord. His Eden shall not be lost, till the 
serpent of worldly wisdom shall tempt him to forget 
God's bounty in the rich bounty of nature; then, indeed, 
he is cast out though he walk ever in the tropic fulness 
of a perpetual autumn joined to the fresher glories of 
perpetual summer. When the seed-sower puts seed 
in the earth, his eye is away in time, looking as through 
a magic lens, not at the dull, brown, cold and leafless 
tree, the blue steeled sky, dulled into a horizon of lead, 
but forward into the future where he seems to walk, 
like the Nazarene, over a field of green waves, the bil- 
lowy verdure of his coming harvest, and sees a wilder- 
ness of forest-leaves dance in a golden light, and hears 
the psalm of happy birds and the shrill cry of invisible 
insects piping their joy in his sultry nooning. The dial 
finger of the seasons moves forward and stands over 
the hour of golden consummation, shadowy Prophet in 
his halo of immortal sunshine. If any man is called 
by his vocation to walk with God it is the wise tiller 
of the soil, for whom all the invisible powers of earth 
and air and water and the far celestial spheres work 
visibly and half reveal their seraphic outlines under 
the thin veil that covers them. He works in a temple 
where his very hands worship, where the merest Pagan 
grows reverent, and the commonest toiler becomes con- 



180 Faith and Life. 

scious of the beauty and the mystery of things. The 
birds and bees, the barking squirrel and the mining 
musk-rat, are teachers in the normal school of faith. 
The instinct of the bird is prophetic and foretells the 
coming storm. She knows, in her tropical retreat, 
when the snows of the North are about to leave, and 
the earth to come back to her resurrection of life. 
The laughing squirrel can foresee the winter, and make 
his autumn holiday a day of preparation for his little 
future. These are the signs of a kind of faith adapted to 
their animal wants, a natural trust in the mystery above 
'them, which shows that a conscious goodness watches 
them too, and also sets their humble table according to 
their needs. Their cheer and merryhood strike deeper 
than their natures can conceive, and make them proph- 
ets for profounder natures. So with our instincts ; 
even when blindly working without the lamp of reason, 
they reach down darkly like groping roots and take life 
from the centre, they stretch up greenly, like boughs 
of the live oak, and drink in sun and dew at every 
thrilling pore. Exiled from the Eden of our childish 
dreams, like birds of passage in the sultry South, we 
feel the renewing of the far-off spring, and stretch our 
wings of longing for that beautiful Hereafter, whose 
prophecy seems pictured on the retina of memory, and 
becomes to us as Holy History. 

God is with us, nearer than we know. Like the gay 
squirrel flickering from bough to bough in the red light 
of autumn, man works for a future he does not under- 



Faith and Life. 1 8 1 

stand, and nurses a faith which may wait long to take 
conscious shape and consistency, but which still in its 
most instinctive form is germinal faith, an evidence of 
things not seen, a substantial token of the things hoped 
for. He never ceases to lay up mental treasures, to 
store wisdom for the winter of age, and when age 
comes, to digest them into vital experiences, to fuller 
growth of the ever-sateless soul. Nature is persistent 
in his particular being as in the general life, and gives 
no indication that she means a finality by his death. 
He puts out new buds of hope, new longings and lof- 
tier aspirations, gathers ideas, heaps up results, and 
starts anew from every closing cycle, to broaden and 
quicken a growth for which there is no field ample 
enough on his shore of the grave, nurturing a glorious 
tree of life on either side of the river which we call 
death. All his life long, over and above his physical 
wants, he has been accumulating with no definite end 
which reason could create among earthly uses, feeding 
dreams of a perfectness that time could not evolve and 
realize, hopes of a joy that earth could never give, 
aspirations toward an excellence that no mortal model 
could even suggest, far less supply, and, in a thousand 
unconscious ways, living for a nobler end than life, in 
the promptings of a high faith, that silently draws on the 
reason to confess its mastery, and to lend it more sub- 
stantial footing for more conscious flights. Bird and 
beast have pointed the way, in working so for their 
limited future. Man's own instincts have carried him 



1 82 Faith and Life. 

on the line beyond the utmost need of bird or beast, 
beyond the grasping avarice of man's earthly life, into 
a region of unbounded wants and as illimitable attain- 
ments. We have a right, then, to assent to the words 
of the Prophet, and assert in a broader sense that man 
lives by faith, and can only live by faith, faith in an 
unknown future, an invisible over-soul, a worker above 
the worker, a light beyond the sun, a life throughout all 
life, a God over all private gods. 

When a man is in downright earnest, his arm and 
brain and fiery soul have vigor in them, and work 
together to great results. He must believe in the thing 
he does, in his power to do it, and in the concurrence 
of all true workers in that thing ; and the more, above 
all this, he can trust in the approval of the everlasting 
Worker, the more impregnable will be his position, the 
more enduring his work. A sort of faith is absolutely 
essential to any work for life maintenance in this world, 
and the more definitely that faith comes out and takes 
hold on God, the more is final triumph made a cer- 
tainty, and partial defeat is as the dust of the balance 
against the full result. Will a man have corn ? He 
will never move one clod till he feels that the constancy 
of the seasons is reliable, that sun and rain and dew, 
and the subtle salts of the earth, will do their wont, and 
that an invisible, inscrutable somewhat will insist on 
adhesion of corn to the law of its kind ; knowing what 
has been hitherto, he can safely trust what will be, and 
so by his faith find means to live. Yet nature is not so 



Faith and Life. 183 

constant that he can look on frosty nights without a 
sinking heart, while the tender shoot is yet new to the 
experience of doubtful life, or the full ear still holds its 
milky richness unguarded by its toughened shield. He 
who sees God a life in the motions of nature has 
stronger grounds for his unwavering faith, and though 
stark famine stare him in the face, he sees beyond all 
present ills the good to which they only hurry him, his 
true soul-harvest growing from the seeds of patience and 
suffering to a fruitage richer than the fabled garden of 
the Hesperides. But what avails a barren faith, a mere 
mental assent to the perpetuity of species, the laws of 
vegetation, and the immutable round of the years ? 
Will such an assent give corn ? No ; verily, we must 
dig. Dig we cannot without some germ of faith ; but 
cultivate a mental faith never so assiduously, not a green 
corn-blade will bless our longing sight, not a creamy 
corn-ear will gladden our yearning taste, till we culti- 
vate also the stubborn glebe, and make our calloused 
hands a hornbook of devotion. In the litanies of this 
faith work is worship, and the clangor of all activities is 
the hymning of the choir. God worketh hitherto and 
the sons of God work with him. 

To ask whether life here or hereafter is the reward 
of faith or of works, is only to ask if the child you see 
there is the offspring of father or mother, if the gyra- 
tions of the stars result from centre-seeking or centre- 
flying force, if any composite is the result and sole pro- 
duct, of either ingredient. Men who call harmonious 



184 Faith and Life. 

soul-life Heaven, and apply the term salvation to the 
means of growth by which lesser natures become fuller 
and happier, point to Jesus and say with poor fluctua- 
ting Peter in one of his zealous moments, " There is 
no other name given under heaven whereby we can be 
saved. He that believeth not in him shall be damned." 
But what sort of faith in him is to give growth and har- 
mony of life ? Is the most implicit confidence in the 
reputed accuracy of all he is reported to have said and 
done a guarantee of our salvation ? Or if we with 
hearty warmth accept every word as excellent, every 
deed as divine, and spend whole years in idle admira- 
tion of his greatness and goodness, will that avail much 
to make us greater or better ? Never, till we begin to 
put that faith into personal experience, and make it a 
life. Never, till our faith takes the form of universal 
law, so much greatness for so much earnest work of 
brain, hand, heart and soul, so much purity for so much 
positive life-martyrdom and self-searching, so much 
favor of the highest and richest for so much practical 
devotion to the lowest and most needy. No amount of 
idle belief in the goodness of any brave, true worker will 
accomplish our work. Faith in Jesus will not save any 
man till it is translated into work and builds him up tittle 
by tittle, as the strong brawn of the smith's right arm is 
built up by activity. Blow upon blow upon the ringing 
anvil shapes the tough steel and tortures from its rigid 
gripe some essence of its elastic vigor for the brave arm 
that conquers it. So every stubborn hindrance, every 



Faith and Life, 185 

trial, every loss conquered and wrestled down, give 
back their tough persistency a trophy to the victor. 
Herein is salvation, not in reliance upon God in Christ, 
but in reliance upon God in us, not in the victory which 
the Nazarene wrung from the tortured and writhing 
flesh in the garden of Gethsemane in the hour of his 
agony, but in the victory which that lesson is well fitted 
to teach us, our possibility of winning, and which we 
must first win over the flesh and the world, before our 
souls are saved from the bondage of both. All past 
greatness and goodness are useful to teach faith, not in 
their possessors, but in our ability to possess. 

" Lives of great men all remind us 
We may make our lives sublime," 

make them sublime, not reap the fruits of their sublim- 
ity. What a brave true man has done a brave true man 
can do. Faith in a good man becomes saving faith 
when it gives us confidence and courage to do as well, 
but when we sit down lauding his name with hallelu- 
jahs, under the vain impression that he was good 
enough for both of us, we shall grow lean and of beg- 
garly spirit, having failed to put our life-coin to usury. 

Every man at last must pay for all he has, and 
though one may borrow and another lend, the day of 
compensation comes and the soul is thrown back upon 
its vital resources, the moment it can go alone. No 
man can grow for us, be great for us, or substitute his 

excellence for our baseness. If we could be made better 
24 



1 86 Faith and Life. 

by such a transfer, he would be made poorer. We all go 
into our places on our own ticket ; even that of Jesus 
of Nazareth, is endorsed, Not transferable, and admits 
only the bearer. The Almighty never intended to 
crowd heaven with dead-heads. His free grace is 
ample enough when he has given every man feet and 
hands for walking and working, a brain for thought, and 
a soul for every spiritual emotion. To give us the tools 
for the work, and then do our work for us, were a fool- 
ish weakness and no fatherly kindness. It is not in 
the harmony of his known methods to give bounties to 
the idler, or purchase parasites to mouth his praise, 
who might better be doing the work which their several 
capacities prove them designed for. The man who can 
shout hallelujahs for a victory he has not fought to win, 
can peal a charging cry in the thick cloud of the battle. 
If he can wave torches in illumination for triumph, he 
can stand at the gun-stock and use his torch to kindle 
the black thunder-dust, and earn a right to wave it after- 
wards in glorifying. If a man have breath to praise 
God, he has breath to serve God, which is far better 
praise. But God's needs are not personal ; all his 
wants are incarnated in man and embodied in Nature. 
He has no hunger but in hungry lives of created 
things ; he has no sorrow but in the grief of finite 
beings; he has no need of anything but in the needi- 
ness of his creatures. The moment a man ceases to 
serve self in the exclusive sense, he begins to serve 
God, and even while he serves himself in the prepa- 



Faith and Life. 187 

ration for nobler uses, he serves God as truly as the 
archangels in the upper heavens. No man can do any- 
thing for the infinite but in doing for the finite. The 
All-life cannot be enlarged, his joys enhanced, his glory 
burnished, or his name exalted, by any word or work 
of ours towards him ; but done to the exaltation of his 
needy ones, it is done to him, so and so only. 

The only belief which is availing, then, is one which 
gives impulse to action. Are you called to preach the 
Gospel of Truth ? You must first have faith in the 
word you would speak, and trust that in Man is a 
natural love of truth, so that he will receive it when 
it is well put, that in yourself is some gift of expression 
making it possible to get it clear enough for general 
apprehension, and more than this, that though the truth 
you are to utter should so shave off, with its keen steel, 
the knots and excrescences of selfish interests, as to 
bring down great wrath on your head, you may feel so 
sure that the Eternal is with you, that you can bear 
with patience the transient wrong you may suffer. 
This demands faith in yourself, faith in mankind, and 
faith in God as the basis of them both. But suppose 
you have these faiths mentally, give the most hearty 
consent to them, and yet say nothing, will your faith save 
you, will it save anybody, will the crooked and gnarled 
knots of wrong and selfishness get planed straight 
and smooth by your thinking ? Never. You must 
push the weapon home though the splinters fly, and 
make it to coincide with the tri-square of eternal jus- 



1 88 Faith and Life. 

tice. So worked the Judaean Carpenter, and became a 
Messiah and Saviour of men ; so must you work who 
would build one, the least column in the great temple 
of Truth. Do we believe in immortality, and yet sup- 
pose that this too may be a dead and barren faith ? 
Do we verily believe that the enfranchised soul can 
pour the vibrations of its thought through living or- 
ganism, that the holy eyes of a mother may look on 
us at any moment, at that very moment when the 
temptation to some gross vice, or secret meanness is 
strong upon us, and does this faith yet come to no 
fruitage in our active life ? - Do we trust that every 
true deed gives a nobler stand-point to the soul and 
that, every base deed degrades it, that our hereafter 
is but one step from our here, and life is an unbroken 
continuity of experiences, and no spasmodic leaps up 
the steep heights of attainment, and yet think it possi- 
ble that our faith may be a living faith when it gives no 
sign in our life ? I trow not. If one believes but the 
naked truth that we are, individually and actually, in 
life's hereafter, when death has completed the dissolu- 
tion of that marriage of soul and clay, it must bear 
with it such inevitable consequences in every earnest 
mind as to make a visible mark on the life it leads. 
A doubt of immortality has embittered the hearts of 
thousands, and made their hands weak and inefficient 
even in the necessary work of to-day. But change that 
doubt into happy faith, and the hand grows vigorous to 
fulfil its duty on earth for the nobler ripening of the 



Faith and Life. 189 

soul linked to the clay for a worthy purpose, and be- 
yond this, and better than this, the soul puts forth to 
bloom and beautiful fruitage those shooting buds of 
prescient life that no blighting doubt could quite de- 
stroy, though earth has no garden for their roots to 
strike in. 

Every life has in it some prophecy of a greater life. 
The fluttering monad, trembling up from dead inertia 
to one faint quiver of electric motion, predicts the 
germ-cell of some vivid atom of higher organic life. 
The germ with vibrant cilia, traversing its liquid ele- 
ment, predicts the living atom, the living atom shows 
incipient organs which the next form brings out. The 
serpent has the intimation of the legs the lizard really 
possesses, so that the lizard is Nature's old snake with 
improvements. At length, step after step, enlarging 
upon the best of the past, and dropping little by little 
the superseded organism, we have the animal man, 
who, physiologists will tell you, has not quite oblit- 
erated the old monkey pattern, in more than one par- 
ticular. 

Not that these successions are related as child to 
parent ; for nothing can be more palpably absurd, nor 
farther from the natural fact ; but as men retain in some 
new invention some features of the old, as, for example, 
the coach-form of the first railroad carriage, the paddle- 
oar in the first steamboat, or the fire-place in the 
furnace-heated house, so nature perfects a new form 
on the altered model of the old, as if expressly to teach 



190 Faith and Life. 

us that her last effort was actually intended in her first. 
It is inconceivable to man that any model in clay can 
possibly transcend his form in its own perfection, but 
there is no need of that, for we find that, unlike all 
below him, man is individually, infinitely perfectible, 
which puts an infinite difference between man and any 
other creature. The predictive indications of a greater 
future are in his soul, his everlasting insatiety, his 
hopes that no visible sphere can contain, his aspirations 
that make a platform for their feet of the highest cape 
of heaven, his loves which yearn out to the blank which 
hides his loved ones, and the -thousand glimpses of a 
greatness, beauty, truth, and holiness, that only eternity 
could begin to realize. 

When a living faith opens the door into that wonder- 
world, and shows him whither went all those vague 
yearnings and large hopes and insatiable desires, he 
has a directing element to give coherence to his scat- 
tered powers, a field for his superfluous vigor, an aim 
for all that has run to waste before. His life will grow 
larger and more beautiful for his faith, just in proportion 
as the faith is vital and genuine. 

To grow and be more perfect day by day, to do what 
is in us, the better to be what is for us : this is salvation 
and can only be brought forth through the divine union 
of Faith and Works, in our everlasting lives. Man 
must have faith in man to do the duties of a brother, 
neighbor, friend ; must have faith in the eternal mo- 
tions of Nature to wring any good from her impartial 



Faith and Life. 191 

hand, must have faith in God, to lift him over the 
seeming accidents and evils of his finite sphere, and 
give him the sublimest motives for culture, and that 
great self-regeneration which is the first step in becom- 
ing the assistant regenerator of his kind. Divorced 
and sundered, the poor disordered world ^suffers be- 
cause of their alienation. One works in hopeless half- 
doing, one believes in idle no-doing, and both waste 
miserable years in ineffectual life. Bring them together, 
and both your do-naughts will leap up like giants, the 
electric circle of their energies complete, every word 
will flash lightning, every deed strike out far activities 
and echo through the soul like the resonance of thunder. 



